Hyperrhiz 30

The Little Database, by Daniel Scott Snelson

Abby (Bee) Rinaldi
NC State University

Citation: Rinaldi, Abby (Bee). “The Little Database, by Daniel Scott Snelson.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 30, 2026. doi:10.20415/hyp/030.r01

Keywords: database, poetics, media formats, computation, curation, preservation.

Snelson, Daniel Scott. The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats. Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2025. 240pp, 71 illustrations.

Review

Data is the lifeblood of digital curation. Archives are customized entities in algorithmic culture, and users are always making more data to fill the diverse, expansive, and often short-lived collections of digital stacks. In academe, one is reminded of library collections of floppy disks of memos from long-retired deans or external hard drives of students running out of room on their PC to store their mounting PDF collection for course readings. What’s to do with all this information, and what secrets of humanity might systemic review of them reveal to us? In the ever-present tensions between big data’s advocates and dissonants, Snelson’s (2025) “The Little Database” is a love letter to context in the ever-expanding domain of data storage.

Snelson defines the little database widely across the text, but its recurrent traits are that it is too small for the kind of massive study and training we see done with machine learning, tends toward the idiosyncratic and borderline uncomputable, and often involves the transformation of file formats and the media encoded within them. Snelson argues that these little databases, when studied through the lens of poetics, can provide us with means for “investigating the global situation of politics, aesthetics, and meaning in a time of pervasive technological change” (2). If the goal of big data is to flatten large swaths of information into computable patterns for consumption, refinement, and statistical analysis, then poetics of little databases are means of attending to, with care and play emphasized heavily, that which does not lend itself to neatness, order, or even longevity, so that they could be just as well classified as time capsules or period pieces.

Snelson positions his research as somewhere between single artifact close reading and big data analysis. In seeking this middle ground, Snelson offers a refusal for hyper-generalization in studies of databases, neither reducible to their objects nor flattened into a parsable whole. Snelson keeps the focus on art and literature, arguing that the transformations that take place within these little databases are the most evocative. The book includes four chapters, each covering a different little database, file format, and methodology, paired as 1) computation, text files, and Textz.com; 2) preservation, image files, and Eclipse; 3) transmission, sound files, and PennSound; and 4) dispersion, movie files, and UbuWeb (16). These chapters are broken up by interludes that Snelson uses to detail practical approaches for putting the ideas of each chapter into action for scholarly and other creative work.

The common threads through each chapter trace transformations and media entanglements. The objects stored within the database had to come from somewhere, and these previous forms are relevant to each exploration of their manifestations within the little databases, and for understanding the scope and depth of the little database itself. The databases do not simply contain versions or evolutions of each file format, but instead create two-way mirrors for the study of format transition.

Snelson gives an example of this in chapter 3 when discussing the Eclipse database and a particular periodical stored within it, a magazine called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Traces of Xerox copying speak to the digital context of the magazine files, but the digital context also reveals something about the technology of copying, and in that file type transfer is something that speaks to the digital object within the database as an original object instead of a copy of another object. Snelson asks us to resist the temptation to use the digital only to look back at the old, instead suggesting that “we might focus not on the preservation of bibliographic traces etched by the original works, but rather on the bibliographic specificities that the digital files introduce” (88). These specificities come from a complication of context, treating the object as an extension of the previous object’s story rather than the object itself.

While Snelson situates his work within larger discourses around media formats from scholars like Gitelman (2014), and that is certainly a set of discourses engaged here, his work also feels like a response to projects out of software, platform, and code studies over the past decade such as Harrell’s (2013) media phantasms and code poets such as Bajohr (2021) and Piringer (2020). Works that similarly mix theory and praxis like “10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10” (Montfort et al, 2014) engaged code on the level of hyper-specificity, writing about one program, one line of code, and building up macro-level narratives around the Commodore 64 and the effect of cultural narratives around mazes in technoaesthetics. Snelson’s poetics of little databases add to that work with a “yes, and” that seeks to shift focus from just one line of BASIC code to a larger idiosyncratic media landscape of data about and around BASIC and coding one-liners.

As Snelson writes, “a close reading of transcoded objects can occur only in cooperation with playful performances of interpretation that weave together relational databases, variable formats, and the contingent array of technical and cultural mechanisms that facilitate these files” (7). Close reading of code could instead be traded for readings of code bases, IDE architectures, and Github repositories. Computational media scholars, especially those working within rhetorical code frameworks (Brock, 2019, Marino, 2020), will find in The Little Database possibilities for navigating inconsistent data clusters, format shifts, unsupported or dead files, and the uncomputable, all encounters that often derail analysis.

While Snelson’s approach feels widely applicable, its broadness leads to some muddiness. The real limitation is what counts as a little database and knowing when to make those swaps from micro-level observations to macro analysis of the database as a whole. Zooming in and out can become disorienting, especially when the databases themselves vary significantly in breadth, size, and web imprint. How little can a little database be before it’s too small for the difference between the micro and macro to not be negligible? How big can a database be and still be little? If our point of reference as readers are the databases of LLMs, most databases would count as little databases in comparison. The interludes do clear up some of the applications of the poetic approach to the little database, but “little” still remains loosely defined. This is something that will certainly take shape with further usage of little databases within media scholarship.

References

Bajohr, H. (2021). Blanks. Counterpath Press.

Brock, K. (2019). Rhetorical Code Studies: Discovering Arguments in and around Code. University of Michigan Press.

Gitelman, L. (2014). Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Duke University Press.

Harrell, D. F. (2013). Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression. MIT Press.

Marino, M. (2020). Critical Code Studies. MIT Press.

Montfort, N., Baudoin, P., Bell, J., Bogost, I., & Douglass, J. (2012). 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. MIT Press.

Piringer, J. (2020). Data Poetry. Counterpath Press.

Snelson, D. S. (2025). The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats. University of Minnesota Press.