I find the way Angela Haas explains organization interesting, especially in relation to the relationships between database and narrative that Folsom and Hayles discuss. Haas clarifies her usage of subheadings, stating “Despite the use of subheading to facilitate spatially organized logics, it is important to read productive intellectual and practical overlaps across and between the…
Folsom reminds us of the inherent excess haunting both database and narrative: each requires a perpetual eclipsing of an out-thereness; a map of infinite possibilities that can only be illuminated one at a time, emerging from thresholds like phantoms. If databases provide bits and pieces rendered visible by a series of choices; narratives are the…
In contrast to Manovich and Folsom’s theorization of the database as counter-narrative and an autonomous entity, I completely concur with Hayles’s theory that the two are symbionts. Based on Mieke Bal’s elements of narration, which include actor, narrator, text, story, and fabula (p. 1606), I contend that narrative makes up for database’s shortcomings since the…
Although I haven’t read any of Ed Folsom’s other works and I believe he has contributed significantly to other scholarly discussions, I can’t help but wonder if he, like the theorist Lev Manovich who influenced him, is still adamant about his assertion of the autonomy of databases or if he would prefer to rethink his…
As I reflect on what it means for diaspora to be sited, Hayle’s words illuminate a puzzling interlinkage between diaspora and database: both “can only speak that which can be explicitly spoken” (1605). When I think of Karen peoples’ movement across time and space, I think of fixed dates and mappable locations—material sites locked into…
A product of Burma’s diaspora, I’m rooted in a country only familiar to me in its immaterial, unbounded, storied form; evoking a home that is more apparition than physical site. Yet, my roots—my linkages to the non-space of Karen oral histories—are also characterized by an abiding rootlessness: we (myself/my ancestors) dwell not in static spaces…
Mailloux’s (2000) historical trace of disciplinary conflicts, rhetorical transitions, and epistemological aftermaths contains a wealth of information. Amidst all those arguments raised, the author’s conclusion most closely aligns with some of the ideas I have previously had because of my encounters with identity politics and labeling in academia both as a student and teacher. Academics…