Database as a Symbolic Form, by Lev Manovich, 2001

The database is a collection of items that a user can "view, navigate, [and] search". CD-ROMS, websites, the internet, encyclopedias, and photo-albums are all examples of a database. Each having multiple ways of being seen; the viewer creating their own linear path or perspective. This is different from a movie or novel, where the information is all in the author's head, multiple paths available, and one path is made solid and absolute. Both forms of expression, the database and the narrative, reflect the world around us.

"The Web sites never have to be complete... The sites always grow."

I believe merging the database with a narrative creates a more lifelike experience: more relatable and validating. But it seems Manovich wants to pick apart this concept, study our reaction to narratives like Man with a Movie Camera, created from a database about a database. As he comments on Vertov, his tone of voice changes to one of appreciation and awh, while throwing in sentences of his distaste of more 'mainstream' film-makers. These paragraphs filled with personal perspective and quick judgements detached me as a reader. Manovich's final sentences caused my head to scream out counter-arguments.

"Thus, in the hands of Vertov, a database, this normally static and "objective" form, becomes dynamic and subjective. More importantly, Vertov is able to achieve something which new media designers still have to learn - how to merge database and narrative into a new form."

If Manovich had mearly given me the insights Vertov's unique piece had been trying to show, I would have been interested. But because he insists on saying all other new media designers have yet to learn these wonderful merging abilities, I'm filled with anger and lash out comments to counter with. Vertov did not give us some grand "new form" of database, narrative mergence. He mearly gave a unique perspective on these concepts, in a cold, dry, and abstract form, which a marjority of people will find boring to sit through. I'm more interested in seeing how artists and filmmakers combine database and narative in a way that communicates to many people; that whoever you are, you will feel and experience and understand this artists' perspective on the world. That some things can be universal, that in some ways we're all similar and can relate to one another. Manovich sounds angry at certain groups of people and so I fought through much of this paper. With the last few pages being the climax of subjective comments and critisicms, I now have trouble recalling those first sections I believed to be interesting and insightful.