Types of Databases:
-Hierarchical database: It arranges the data in hierarchies that's similar to a tree structure with parent and child relationships such as a family tree.
-Network databases: It uses "sets" to establish a hierarchy that allows children to have more than one parent and establishes many-to-many relationships.
-Relational database: It uses tables to structure the data and the tables are identified by a unique name and that can be called and identified by the database. Relational database are based on the research of Dr. E. F. Codd at IBM in the late 1960s.
-Client and Server database: It allows multiple "clients" to have access and retrieve the information from the constant operated database from anywhere at any time.
-Object-Oriented database: They're designed to operate well with object-oriented programming languages such as Java and make entries in the database appear as programming language objects in one or more languages. The term, "object-oriented database system" first appeared in 1985.
-Real-time database: It's designed to handle a large workload and constant changes. This is different from traditional databases because they contain persistent data which is usually unaffected by time. An example is a stock market is constantly active and the database has to keep track of the current values of all of the markets in the New York Stock Exchange for example. Therefore real-time processing is needed. Real-time processing is when a transaction is processed quick enough that it could be acted on and be returned immediately. They're useful for banking, medical records, accounting, law, and scientific data analysis.
Database aesthestics emphasizes more on the "front end" which is the interface that the user usually sees and it's visible and is more focused on the concept of algorithms and the visual than the "back end" which would be the structure and the container that houses the data.
The 1990s was a time of significant amount of digitalization such as museums, libraries, archives, and museum collections were translated into digital format.
Victoria Vesna's creation of "Bodies INCorporated" and the "Virtual Concrete" is emphasizing that as one becomes incorporated into the database of Bodies INCorporated the information that the participants post can be a convienent way to gather data for other purposes and it could be manipulated. It also means that there's the potential of loss of identity as there's so many participants that's a part of the database.
Participants are asked to create their bodies and become members once they enter the online website, Bodies INCorporated. The members can pick from an assortment of body parts. This project can be compared to the Visual Human Project by the anatomical parts or live human bodies are scanned in and each section is sold separately for game design or animation. The members become a part of the collection of identity profiles in the database. Here's an example of one member's profile. The name is Viper, he's male, he's 18, he's heterosexual, and his condition of disease.
This project shows that with technology, our bodies are reduced to large data sets and become a part of the collective. Also the members can have access to each other's profiles and the artist and the artist can control and define how the information will be used. An example is that the artist would send emails to the member that they were unsuccessful and not able to delete their 'body' (the one they created) and thus the information and the 'body' will still be in the database. The artist wanted to show how posting personal information can affect our lives in reality and it shows how it difficult it is to try to remove that personal information. Therefore the member doesn't have the control but the one who designed the database which is the artist in this case.
Another project is called "Poetry Machine_1.5" by David Link.
Link's installation starts out as an empty database where there isn't any connections between the typed words that are displayed. The viewer types in words. There's a built-in search engine that finds texts from the Internet and then analyzes those texts. The database takes words that have an association to the words that are already typed. Then it stores all of the data and then the words are positioned with their meanings in the form of a cluster with other words. The more connections between two words, the database finds, the stronger their link and the likeliness of the chance that the word will show up from other words. If a word is typed that isn't known to the database, the program will send out autonomous 'bots' to the Internet to collect the texts in which the unknown word could be found.
The word dream was used as an example as one of the words that was first typed in. It shows that it's a database that is more based on the connections between the words. The words that formed a circle especially the outer one were more and they were connected to the center and to the words that were out of the circle. It shows that idea of referencing and indexing which databases can help to retrieve information by using a reference or the index to take you to the specific information and accumulating more data as time goes and the search engine finds more results. I think this can also highlight information overload because the links show which words had more results and it shows how much information is at disposal within the database.
Other uses of databases:
Social Security numbers make up the largest social database and is used to track the citizens of that country and these are usually government databases. The most obvious forms of databases are popular multimedia encyclopedia. This also includes virtual museums. The CD-ROMS that take the user on a tour of the museum collection in the virtual museum makes the museum become a database of images that can be accessed in different ways. However this technology threatens the institutions that have been established to store certain types of data and the way the knowledge is disseminated at uinversities. The database allows all objects to be stored as bits rather than being traditionally splitted by media or form.
Here's an example of an encyclopedia online that holds so much information of multiple subjects from other dictionaries in other databases. It shows that information is digitalized and is more accessible to the public since encyclopedias are most commonly found in libraries. http://www.encyclopedia.com/
Even the Internet can be considered a database. A web page is made of separate elements such as images or other links to other web pages. It's always possible to add a new element to the list and most web pages are a collection of separate elements such as texts and images and graphs. There can always be new elements added and thus the elements become data.
eg. Wikipedia
This website can be seen as a database because people can post their information and research on there and one can navigate, search, and retrieve information from a variety of topics and even go to the links on the page. "It's a distributed networked system of humans interested in sharing and adding to the collective body of knowledge". However it shows again how this type of encyclopedia can affect the way it's used in universities since it's not seen as an academic and scholarly source, you can't use it as a source most often and even then the information isn't reliable or accurate at times.
The Archive
An archive is a collection of historical records and the location in which it's kept. It contains record which has been accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime. The archives of an individual may include letters or scrapbooks collected or made by the individual. The archives of an organization consist of records such as administrative records or business records. There's also Internet archiving which is an archive that includes copies of archived pages, audio, movies, and books on the World Wide Web that were taken over time.
R. Buckminster Fuller kept an archive of his life from 1907 to 1917 and called it "Chronofile". This work showed many aspects of his life such as his participation in World War I and later he kept a record of all the technological and scientific inventions at that time. He wanted to make the attempt to keep everything and it showed that he documented the world around him at the time.
Fuller is important because the time he invested to collect and document his life is the investment of time that is used to have information about ourselves so that we can be remembered even when we die. Collecting, storing, and archiving is very much present because of our anxiety of the speed at which time travels. We create a memory bank in which we preserve ourselves and our experiences and contribution and the hopes of having these things to be remembered and be placed within some realm of importance.
Meg Ranston makes this point in her piece, "Who's Who by Size". Edgar Allen Poe, at 633 volumes and takes up 63 and a half feet space on the shelves compared to Mummad Ali who occupies aonly 15 volumes. This piece shows how much is one's importance measured. Edgar Allen Poe would seem to be on the high end of the scale in importance and definitely has more history written about him than Muhammad Ali.
The other view of the archive is a living memory. Memory is a storage of codes that allow you to reconstruct information and that brings some kind of image that approximates the image that you actually had in your perception or evoke an emotion that's attached and resonates with that experience.
The installation, "Pockets Full of Memories" by George LeGrady is an archive that is made up of objects that museum visitors carried with them such as toys and which are scanned. On the map, nearby places tend to have similar items. This may be that the attribute values or items that may be named likely. Even if the visual qualiites of an image are alike then it might be that the two people evaluated the item differently based on their subjective opinion. So it's really just similar items that look for each other without any centralized command.
This project shows that documentation of the world and establishing a relationship to the viewer and the archived objects. The objects show a trace of human contact and trace because that object was with the viewer and the viewer wants to leave something that reflects about them to be left behind. It shows how human thought can be similar but yet so different from one individual to another and how a human mind can be complex in thinking and abstract. This also shows the sense of living memory as an archive because those materials that people scanned are the testaments that they were here and participated.
Here's an example of a website that has an archive of images, text, and audio from the Internet.
http://www.archive.org/index.php
Lastly, there's always something new entering the archive. The things that are defined as being important for life, for history, for human beings would need to be put in an archive. Thus the role of the archvie comes to represent the life outside the realm of the archive. There's alwasy the belief that your object has more significance than any other person even though everyone has something that's important to them personally.
The cultural archive finds itself in a bind. On one hand, the archive has a demand for completeness that it should collect and represent all that exists outside itself but yet there's a difference of value of objects that are valuable compared to objects that aren't looked at and are easily dismissed or have no worth. The whole archive doesn't represent reality rather only to which is new to the archive does that. The new object has an aura and is thought of as real. However when the newness of the object wears off then the aura of the object is unbelievable.
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