This entry ponders the significance of database as an act of theory-making in two phases: database as fate and database as canon-making. The intention of this work is to extend the consideration of formation of knowledge in digital spaces as an active process influenced by the metaphysical, an interwoven academic lifemaking that penetrates into the daily experience of reconciliation of known and unknown, and ponder the significance of preliminary exams and committee-making as a lived example of these theoretical loci.
One: Database as Harmonoia, Database as Fate
A week ago, I sat in a telehealth digital office, complete with serene paintings in muted warm colors, conversing with my therapist about the intricacies of preliminary exams. The irony of this digitization of mental health care is not lost on me. My therapist is a (virtual) saint who lives, in my experience, only in my computer; a specialist in the uniquely gifted, who helps to make sense of my high-achieving brain as well as some Complex-PTSD from the final year of my Masters.
In this digital space, I was explaining to her the tentative and tricky formation of dissertation committees, the building of a reading list, the honoring and validation of knowledge built over countless years and hours, the demonstration of excellence in the shrouds of tradition-bound and mysterious meaning-making. I described the creation of a body, corporeally realized, of disciplinary literacy, tumultuously born into world by the graduate student only to be immediately reformed, renegotiated, reinvigorated by a carefully chosen panel of mentor-stewards, who determine whether this student and their intellectual offspring are worthy of rising to their daemonic ranks.
I was effusively speaking about this, describing how excited I was to undertake this process myself. I was reflecting on the people already present in my database, roles to be determined, but assignment to the team clear. The roster complete. I explained that others who do not have the relationships I do may not see this process as I am, as an act of world-making, of mentorship into a sacred field to the highest degree. I articulated the significance of my cosmos to me, the roles fulfilled, the reason for their selection. The divinely-touched series of events that brought them fully into my life, accidental and yet entirely not. I reflected on the realization that even just one misstep in the past may have altered this promising in-road drastically.
She, from a very different academic background, seemed somewhat stunned and then, as therapists are, calmly alarmed. “So,” she said, “these four or five people hold your fate. Who you select decides a destiny. Your collection of voices calls your future.”
What she was describing was an act of selection as fate, a movement or instinct of curation as harmon(oic) (or the paranoia of when conditions are too peaceful, too easy) and tactical, a building of a body as divinely serendipitous. A preliminary exam seems to be, in many ways, an act of canon-making (Banks, 2011), an enactment of mastery, the passing of a gateway. Estrem and Lucas (2003) offer a collective data presentation on the purpose and objective of these databasic exercises (figure 1) divided into three central categories: critical thinking, expert knowledge, and research/teaching ability.
These three categories of the student’s own navigating determine, along with the demigod committee, what that student’s fate is to be. The way these intertwined databases of committee and reading list and questions designed come together is the result of the student’s ability to plan and pronoically see the future. In this way, perhaps it is germane to assess whether a database itself is a work of fate. Whether the organization and placement and selection of materials within tangible or intangible spaces is a work of divine providence, a modus operandi of supernatural inclination. The student, shown in figure 2, moves through a planetary unworld possibility and potential, relying only on pronoic instinct.
In a recent tarot reading, my guide described a formation of a protective energy quadriad, with four cards pulled referencing a sense of guidesmanship, of theanthropic aegis, of animaic eros. The throughlines: shared knowledge, mutual learning, cerebral nexus, spelled a pattern of supernatural fatedness that felt too prevalent to discount, closely in line with critical thinking, expert knowledge, development of teaching. I began to consider what it meant to form an energy database, to theorize digitization of this energy, to collect the messaging of the stars. In the words of Han (2022), “the heart belongs to the terrestrial order” (p. 75). And, the heart belongs to the people of this terrestrial order (figure 3).
So too, what do we make of the role of fate in data uncollected? Is it worth accounting for possibilities untrodden? What becomes of astral threads left out of universal formation? As we earn crowns of interstellar origin, what accounts for jewels ignored? (figure 4).
Two: Databases as Canon
Ullman (1987) opens his piece on database theory with the quote “the past is prolog/the future is prolog too,” from Shakespeare’s Tempest, and concludes with the sentiment “We remind the community that not everything that is implemented is necessarily the best that can be done” (p. 104). Databases seem then to be an open form of canonical formation, something that we thoughtfully orchestrate to be representative of a larger prolog, of a throughline, of a composed branch of meaning or otherwise significant theory. Though too, Ullman leaves this thread tentative and lightly-held: as in all processes of canon making, we are not necessarily ascribed to doing our best work, and with external influences of fatigue, disinterest, pressures hidden and explicit, the mastery of craft may fall by the wayside.
There is freedom in this, too, particularly as we extend the thematic to the three databasical categorizations of Estrem and Lucas’s (2003) quantification of preliminary exam objectives: perhaps if we are to database our collective body of critical thinking, expert knowledge, and research/teaching ability, we can be okay with what is unfinished or still developing. In this way, database becomes a form of archival work (Price, 2009), a gathering of what is known at a snapshot of time that evolves and continues, that shifts, that remains nothing if not a process of phylogeny, of roots stretching and growing as branches simultaneously grow longer with greater reach.
But as this canon breathes and grows, so too the pillars or guardians remain the same in spirit, the same in role, the same in their divinely-given placement. The data may shift, but the base remains canon. So too, this canon, this supernatural predetermining of influence, may be for better or worse. The database may choose to build its canon anew to defy its foundation, but the bricks below the paint remain the same. The people who form our data never leave us (figure 5).
So as the past is prolog, so in turn is the future.
References
Banks, A. J. (2011). Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age. Southern Illinois University Press.
Estrem, H., & Lucas, B. E. (2003). Embedded traditions, uneven reform: The place of the comprehensive exam in composition and rhetoric PhD programs. Rhetoric Review, 22(4), 396-416.
Han, B.-C. (2022). Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld (D. Steuer, Trans.; 1st edition). Polity.
Price, K. M. (2009). Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3(3).
Ullman, J. D. (1987, June). Database theory—past and future. In Proceedings of the sixth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (pp. 1-10).
