What is the opposite of “big” data? In a society where households commonly store personal archives of photos, financial records, and other documents, the “little” database—the personal data collection that is stored and backed up and not accessed frequently—deserves a category of its own. In The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats, Daniel Scott Snelson examines globally accessible little databases, such as Textz, Eclipse, and UbuWeb, explores how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host, and asks how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn. Snelson is joined in conversation with Vicki Bennett, Craig Dworkin, and Luca Messarra. 


Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, archivist, and assistant professor in the departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he also serves as faculty with the Digital Humanities Program, the UCLA Game Lab, and the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. He is author of multiple volumes of experimental poetry and poetics, including Elden Poem, Apocalypse Reliquary, and EXE TXT.

Vicki Bennett is a multidisciplinary British artist working under the name People Like Us. 

Craig Dworkin is professor of English at the University of Utah.

Luca Messarra is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University, and founder of Undocumented Press.


EPISODE REFERENCES:
Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database
Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, “Deformance and Interpretation" (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl800/Deformance.pdf)
We Edit Life, film (People Like Us/Vicki Bennett; partnership with Lovebytes)
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (Internet Archive, 2024, eds. Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland, Juliya Ziskina)
Eclipse, an image-based archive of small press poetry books and magazines
PennSound, a site distributing audio recordings of poetry readings
UbuWeb, a collection of experimental film and video art
Allen Institute for AI
C4/Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus
Christopher Kelty, "The Internet We Could Have Had"
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (ed. Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews)
L≠A≠N≠G≠U≠A≠G≠E magazine (ed. Danny Snelson)
Christian Marclay, The Clock
Johanna Drucker
Memory of the World archive
Future Knowledge podcast
Rory McCartney and Charlie Morgan, Heated Words: Searching for a Mysterious Typeface 
Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying 


Praise for the book:
“The Little Database is an incredibly powerful intervention into twenty-first-century experimental poetics and avant-garde media practices.”
—Stephanie Boluk


“The Little Database opens new ground for close reading in an environment that heavily promotes big data techniques and the neoliberal ideologies that accompany it in the new economy of attention.”
—Leonardo Reviews

“Snelson targets the fundamental assumption underlying much of contemporary DH work: that meaningful interpretation necessarily depends on the deployment of massive amounts of data.”
—Oxford's Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“This book, while short in length, is certain to be long in influence, as it lays groundwork for future scholars, artists, readers, website makers, and archivists. The twists and turns, both in methodology and in specific analyses, are far more exciting than any summary, or even multiple readings of them, could serve.”
—Digital Humanities Quarterly



The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats by Daniel Scott Snelson is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at Manifold.

The digitized afterlives of cultural objects.

In this episode of "What Does the Fox Say?" with host Dr. Nathan Fox, he answers listeners' questions regarding choroid plexus cysts, placing an IUD during a C-section, third trimester bleeding, the difference between Cervidil and Pitocin for induction, and family history of pregnancy complications. 

"Mailbag 25: What does the Fox say" - With Dr. Nathan Fox

This is a talk I was invited to provide to the inaugural 2021 Stoicon-X Military conference, held online.  I chose as my topic the scope of genuine courage, a topic of considerable importance but also frequent misunderstandings within professions like that of the military.  

In this talk I discuss what courage is and what it is for, the scope of courage, including its constituent virtues, and finally the relationship between courage and the other virtues.

The Scope of Genuine Courage In Stoicism - Sadler's Lectures

This November, more than 3 million New Yorkers are facing a food emergency. Between the rising costs of groceries and expiration of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, working families across New York are at risk.  In the Capital District (and elsewhere), labor unions are working with the Regional Food Bank of NENY and others for a mass food distribution at multiple sites on Saturday, Nov. 12. Mark Emanation of the Capital District Area Labor Federation talks with Mark Dunlea of Hudson Mohawk Magazine. https://regionalfoodbank.net/2025-thanksgiving-food-distribution-live/

CDALF Assists with Mass Food Distribution Nov. 12

In this episode of "What Does the Fox Say?" with host Dr. Nathan Fox, we cover questions regarding when to see a fertility specialist, the causes of PROM (premature rupture of membranes), COVID during pregnancy and later complications, not being immune to certain viruses in pregnancy, and transferring two embryos during IVF. 

"Mailbag 26: What does the Fox say" - With Dr. Nathan Fox

Chris Holman speaks with Stephanie Beckhorn, Deputy Director, Employment and Training, LEO (Michigan's Department of Labor & Economic Opportunity) from Media Row, at the Grand Hotel, while at the 2025 Mackinac Policy Conference.

» Visit MBN website: www.michiganbusinessnetwork.com/
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Michigan Business Beat | Mackinac Policy Conference 2025 - Stephanie Beckhorn - #MPC25

In this episode of Healthful Woman, Dr. Stephanie Melka returns to cover birth plans, or “your vision of what your birth is.” She and Dr. Fox explain how women should discuss birth plans with their obstetricians, “deal breakers,” and common requests patients make in their birth plans.

"Birth Plans and God Laughs" - with Dr. Stephanie Melka

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 19th century philosophers and social theorists, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, articulated in their work The Communist Manifesto.

This episode examines what Marx and Engels envision the role of the Communist Party to be in relation to leadership of, and the development of class consciousness in, the Proletariat.  They also address some of the objections made against the Communist program, and set out what their particular goals are.

To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler

If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM

You can find over 3500 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler

You can find the Communist Manifesto free online here https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto - Class Conflict & The Rise Of The Bourgeoisie

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 19th century philosophers and social theorists, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, articulated in their work The Communist Manifesto.

This episode examines Marx and Engel's description of the formation and emergence of the revolutionary class in industrial capitalism, the Proletariat

To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler

If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM

You can find over 3500 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler

You can find the Communist Manifesto free online here https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto -  The Emergence Of The Proletariat

What happens when a government’s big moment gets swallowed by a $100k flight bill? We dive into the Wells drama, the mood inside Labor, and Barnaby Joyce’s leap to One Nation with Amy Remeikis. 

Anika Wells expenses fallout, internal Labor friction, and Barnaby’s big jump to One Nation – with Amy Remeikis

Hudson Mohawk Magazine is a local volunteer-produced news hour that provides sanctuary for the discussion of a wide range of topics, scaling from the global to the hyper-local. The show is broadcasted from The Sanctuary for Independent Media on WOOC 105.3 FM.

Thanks to listeners like you, the Sanctuary is able to use art and participatory action to promote social and environmental justice and freedom of creative expression.

The Home of Business in Michigan. Get on-demand access to audio programs, articles and resources presented by savvy business leaders and industry experts.

I'm that YouTube Philosophy Guy! Find more than 3,000 videos in my main channel.  Support my video and podcast work!  https://www.patreon.com/sadler or https://www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM

Learn more about this podcast channel - https://youtu.be/qRvL0gqlyrw and https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/the-sadlers-lectures-podcast

Due to popular demand - and with the work underwritten by my Patreon supporters - I have been converting my videos into MP3 files listeners can listen to anywhere they want!

I have a second podcast, Mind & Desire, publishing original episodes on a variety of topics in philosophy, which you can find here - https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/podcast

New tracks tagged #LABOR