IS 291B W26 Week 4 Reading Notes

These are my reading notes from taking Histories of the Database with Prof. Miriam Posner in the Information Studies Department at UCLA.

Haigh, Thomas. “How Charles Bachman Invented the DBMS, a Foundation of Our Digital World.” Communications of the ACM 59, No. 7 (2016): 25–30.

Summary

Notes

• Team working at GE build the first DBMS to automate business processes. This system was called the Integrated data store or IDS and was desi9ned by chalres bachman who won the ACM turing award in 1973. He was the first turing award winner without a phd and first person to spend his entire career in industry instead of academia
• Many histories of technology do not focus on databases such as Walter Isaacson’s the innovators
• Development of IDS
  • Detailed functional specifications were completed in January 1962 and hachman presented detailed of the planned system to in house customers in May 1962
  • prototype installation was tested in summer 1983
• Two questions that guide this article
  • “Why do we view IDS as the first database management system,”
  • “What were its similarities and differences versus later systems?”
• You can tell that this article was written by a historian vs industry or pop writer
• Haigh argues that if any system deserved the title of first DBMS then it is the IDS which became the model for the earliest definitions of the DBMS

What Was IDS For?

• Databases evolved in corporate information systems departments and business data processing not academia
• Totally Integrated management information system was the hyped technology and idea of the time
  • A system that would integrate and automate all the core operations of a business, with advanced management reporting and simulation capabilities build in
  • In reality data processing change moved more slowly and focused on administrative applications and batch processing instead of real time
• In this time they were working with magnetic tape which had constraints

Questions

• If databases evolved out of industry needs and were developed in industry, how did database theory develop?

Quotes

Metaxides, A., W. B. Helgeson, R. E. Seth, Et Al. Data Base Task Group Report to the CODASYL Programming Language Committee (selections). Association for Computing Machinery, 1971.

Summary

Notes

Questions

Quotes

Sawtelle, Thomas K. The Emerging Role of the Data Base Manager. R-1253-PR. United States Airforce Project Rand, 1973. http://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED095918.

Summary

Notes

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Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, Brian Massumi, and Gilles Deleuze. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (selections). Ed. 2004, Repr. 2011. Continuum, 2011.

Summary

In this chapter D& 6 explore the difference between what they call arborescent structures and the rhizome. Borrowing from botany and thinking about plants they present the rhizome as a radical rethinking of ontology that rejects the unity of the one singular object or origin point and Instead describe the one rhizome as a assemblage of multiplicities which can be understood via mapping, measurement of dimension and magnitude and its relationship to other machines or assemblages. They move fluidly between examples such as the book, but colonies, the human body, and psychoanalysis. In this way they present a new way of conceiving of the world and the informs both theory and method across disciplines and areas of study

Notes

• Already in the first few sentences D&G are establishing a rhizomatic and assemblage way of thinking with their discussion of the authorship of the text. They say that they wrote the book together and each is already a crowd
• A book is always already made of variously formed matters, it is neither object or subject. A book is an assemblage, it is multiplicity

Quote

” As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs”( pg 4)

• Focus on relationality instead of contents or its meaning
• A book exists as a kind of machine. Machines have input and output and we can study machines by analyzing this and plugging into other machines, but a machine is also a kind of multiplicity, an in organic organism in relation to other machines: war machines, love machines…
• There are two types of books
  • Root-book
  • Radicule system or fascicular root

Root-book

• The root book relies on the spiritual image of the tree, the one but the one implies that there is a not-one. Something that splits between the object and the rest of the world. D&G reject both the oneness of monist ontology and the binary thinking of dialectics as understood by Mao where one becomes two. They argue that nature doesn’t work that way. Binary logic or binary trees move from a one tap-root to a kind of multiplicity but still retain the notion of a singular origin point. This retains the notion of the pivotal taproot supporting the secondary roots but they say that this won’t get us very far

Note

Most relevant to information studies, classification, and databases they say that binary logic and biunivocal relationships dominate linguistics, psychoanalysis, and information science

Radicule System or Fascicular Root

• cyclic unity
• multiple roots
• D&G contrast the root book with a rejection of the taproot or single stem to embrace irreducible multiplicity. Even when multiplicity presents as a totality it is a rhizome

Properties of the Rhizome

1 & 2. Principle of Connection and Heterogeneity

Any point of the rhizome can be connected to any other and must be

3 Principle of Multiplicity

Multiplicities are rhizomatic, a multiplicity has neither subject or object only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature $\text{Quantity}\leftrightarrow \text{Quality}$

Note

This might be some influence of the dialectic in D&G where there is a relationship between quality and quantity. Also some connections to calculus here that I think they will explore later

Note

Also reminds me of the idea of Affine space where there is no point of origin only n-dimensional lines. Even a “point” itself can be considered an n-dimensional line with zero magnitude or length

4 Principle of Asignifying Rupture

• A rhizome can be broken or shattered at a specific spot but will start up again. This is where it is important to acknowledge that rhizomes or assemblages are not inherently liberatory or good. Rhizomes can be liberation movements or fascist concretions

5 & 6 Principle of Cartography and Decalcomania

Note

Def: Decalcomania The process of transferring designs from prepared paper onto porcelain or some other material

• “A rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model”
• D&G contrast tracing and mapping. Tracing seeks to follow the progression of a structure from a single axis point through the successive stages of generation in order to construct hierarchy and describe logics. This method presupposes the logic of the tree. In contrast the rhizome can only be mapped, not traced. Mapping is constructed through contact with the real, not tracing of the abstraction. A map has multiple entry points like a rhizome.
• Tracing $\to$ abstraction, closed logics, self reproduction, flat
• Mapping $\to$ Experimentation and contact, constant modification
• The critique of tracing is connected to D&G’s critique of psychoanalysis (Freud) and linguistics (Chomsky)
• Tracing breaks the rhizome, blotches the map, blocks all of the ways out, arborifies the rhizome. But tracing is not necessarily a dead end and it is possible to enter the rhizome through tracing or the root tree.
• The tree is a limited and overdetermined metaphor that holds many disciplines and forms of knowledge hostage

Avoid Dualism of the Rhizome and the Root Tree

• The root tree and rhizome not opposed models or a kind of Manichean dualism, one is not good and the other bad. There are types of power and domination specific to rhizomes and anarchic structures and formations in the systems of root trees. The first is a transcendent model and the latter is an immanent process or movement. We have to pass through the dualisms in order to arrive at something, constant moving context, construction, and undoing of dualisms

Note

This part sounds really dialectical, like the unity of opposites and Hegel’s sublation of being and non-being into becoming moving from the abstract to the concrete. Need to read more about the relationship of D&G to Hegel

Principle Characteristics of the Rhizome

• Rhizome connects any point to any other point
• Reducible neither to the one or the multiple
• composed of dimensions not units
• Neither beginning nor end but always in the middle (milieu)
• Change in dimension $\to$ change in nature
• Made of only lines
  • Lines of segmentarity and stratification at dimensions
  • Lines of flight or deterritorialization at the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis/changes in nature
  • Rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots
  • Rhizome pertains to a map that must always be produced and is always detachable
  • Rhizome is acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying, organizing memory, or central automation

Plateau

• A plateau is always in the middle, a plateau is made of plateaus
• Bateson understands plateau’s as continuous self vibrating regions of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards culmination or joint or external end (teleology)

Examples

• Wasp and the orchid are heterogeneous and form an assemblage, each deterritorializes and reterritorializes the other.
• We form a rhizome with our viruses
• Even when there is something the follows an arboreal structure like certain plants (i.e. trees) it likely forms a rhizome with something else\

Key Concepts

• Rhizome
• lines of articulation
• Segmentarity
• Strata
• Territories
• lines of flight
• Movement
• Deterritorialization/Reterritorialization
• Destratification
• Assemblage
• Multiplicity
• body without argans
• Assemblage

Questions

Question

How does thinking of a thing, as assemblage, instead of as singular entities change our ontology and thus our understanding and engagements with the world?

Question

If a rhizome is fundamentally multiplicity and connected through relations, and resists grasping the whole then how do we study the object? For example, if a book, information system, or the internet → an assemblage and is rhizomatic how do we study these things?

Quotes