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Methods Café with Daniel Snelson and Mark Algee-Hewitt

Date
Thu May 21st 2026, 5:30 - 7:00pm
Event Sponsor
Department of English
Location
Building 460, Margaret Jacks Hall
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 460, Stanford, CA 94305
426

Please join the Department of English for our next Methods Café on May 21 with Daniel Snelson and Mark Algee-Hewitt!

 

During this Café, Snelson (English, UCLA) will discuss his new book, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats. Algee-Hewitt (English, Stanford) will serve as respondent.

 

By turns marvelous and malevolent, today’s digital culture is dominated by the computation of colossal amounts of data. Within the wake of what now seems quaint to call “big data,” we all maintain smaller, more intimate, but still formidable personal collections. Like the little magazines of the historical avant-gardes, the little database presents a dynamic forum for investigating the situation of politics, aesthetics, and meaning in a time of extensive technological change. In this lecture, Snelson presents a series of inventive methods for the creative interpretation of absolutely ordinary repositories of cultural data.