The world as database: On the relation of software development, query methods, and interpretative independence

Information and Culture

Volumn 47, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 288-311

  Gugerli, David ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84984878600     PISSN: 21648034     EISSN: 21663033     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/lac.2012.0015     Document Type: Review

References (109)

1. Guy Adams, "CSI: The Cop Show That Conquered the World," Independent, December 19, 2006.
2. Mikael Krogerus, "Der Serientäter: Interview mit Steven Bochco," NZZ Folio, no. 10 (2006).
3. See also Leif Kramp and Stephan Alexander Weichert, "Im Schatten des CSI-Effekts: TVSerienverdrängen den Kinofilm," Medienheft, January 22, 2007.
4. Nicholas J. Schweitzer and Michael J. Saks, "The CSI Effect: Popular Fiction about Forensic Science Affects Public Expectations about Real Forensic Science," Jurimetrics 47 (2007): 1-8
5. Michael D. Mann, "The 'CSI Effect': Better Jurors through Television and Science?," Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal 24 (2006): 157-83
6. Donald E. Shelton, Gregg Barak, and Young S. Kim, "A Study of Juror Expectations and Demands Concerning Scientific Evidence: Does the 'CSI Effect' Exist?," Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law 9 (2006): 331-68
7. Tom R. Tyler, "Viewing CSI and the Threshold of Guilt: Managing Truth and Justice in Reality and Fiction," Yale Law Journal 115 (2006): 1050-85
8. Kimberlianne Podlas, "The C.S.I. Effect: Exposing the Media Myth," Media and Entertainment Law Journal 16 (2006): 429-65.
9. Apart from CSI and its already cited derivatives, for example, Without a Trace (2002), Cold Case (2003), NCIS (2003), Criminal Minds (2005), and Shark (2006).
10. An interview by Norbert Schneider in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is an exception: "Fernsehserie 'CSI': Der Mensch als toter Körper," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 21, 2006, 48.
11. That Columbo still has a fan base is, of course, uncontested. See Armin Block and Stefan Fuchs, Columbo: Das große Buch für Fans (Berlin, 1998).
12. Of course, this farewell to hermeneutics does not mean that hermeneutics has completely and forever disappeared from the screens and the minds of our time.
13. Michel Foucault, "Espace, savoir et pouvoir," in Dits et écrits 1954-1988 par Michel Foucault, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994), 270-85.
14. James W. Cortada, The Digital Hand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Manufacturing, Transportation, and Retail Industries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)
15. James W. Cortada, The Digital Hand: Volume II: How Computers Changed the Work of American Financial, Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment Industries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
16. Gene I. Rochlin, Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
17. Paul N. Edwards, "From 'Impact' to Social Process: Computers in Society and Culture," in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff et al. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1994), 257-85
18. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
19. Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998)
20. Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
21. See also Ulf Hashagen et al., eds., History of Computing: Software Issues (Berlin: Springer, 2002).
22. Thomas Haigh, "Inventing Information Systems: The Systems Men and the Computer, 1950-1968," Business History Review 75 (2001): 15-61
23. Jon Agar, The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003)
24. JoAnne Yates, Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
25. United States National Research Council, ed., Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1999), 159-68.
26. Katie Hafner, "Edgar Codd, Key Theorist of Databases, Dies at 79," New York Times, April 23, 2003.
27. See, for example, the account of the history of Web browser technology and the role of Marc Andreesen in Robert H. Reid, Architects of the Web: 1000 Days That Built the Future of Business (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997).
28. Edgar F. Codd, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks," Communications of the ACM 13 (1970): 377-87.
29. The ACM Digital Library lists 799 articles citing Codd. See http://portal.acm.org/.
30. Codd, "Relational Model," 377.
31. For an earlier concept of an end user database, see the stream of work at the System Development Corporation in the 1960s, Charles P. Bourne and Trudi Bellardo Hahn, A History of Online Information Services: 1963-1976 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
32. "We just knew that there was a requirement for databases. We knew that there were different approaches being proposed, and one of them looked clearly superior. So it became a bit of an abstract intellectual exercise, but we knew there was a requirement. We didn't know exactly what it was, but we knew it was needed" (oral history of C. J. Date, interviewed by Thomas Haigh, Computer History Reference number X4090.2007, 13-14, http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/Oral_History/102658166.05.01.acc.pdf).
33. Codd, "Relational Model."
34. On Larry Ellison and the history of Oracle, see Matthew Symonds, Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
35. See Donald D. Chamberlin et al., "A History and Evaluation of System R," Communications of the ACM 24, no. 10 (1981): 632-46.
36. Gordon C. Everest, "The Futures of Database Management," Proceedings of the 1974 ACM SIGFIDET (now SIGMOD) Workshop on Data Description, Access, and Control, May 1-3, 1974, 445-62.
37. Charles W. Bachman, "The Programmer as Navigator," Communications of the ACM 16 (1973): 653-58.
38. Edgar H. Sibley, "On the Equivalences of Data Based Systems," Proceedings of the 1974 ACM SIGFIDET (now SIGMOD) Workshop on Data Description, Access, and Control. Data Models: Data-Structure-Set versus Relational, May 1-3, 1975, 43-76.
39. Edgar F. Codd and Christopher J. Date, "Interactive Support for Non-Programmers: The Relational and Network Approaches," Proceedings of the 1974 ACM SIGFIDET. Data Models, 11-41.
40. Christopher J. Date and Edgar F. Codd, "The Relational and Network Approaches: Comparison of the Application Programming Interfaces," in Proceedings of the 1974 ACM SIGFIDET. Data Models, 95.
41. Ibid.
42. "Data independence" was defined by Date in 1977 as "immunity of applications to change in storage structure and access strategy" (Christopher J. Date, An Introduction to Database Systems [Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1977], cited in Chamberlin et al., "History and Evaluation," 632). Text quote from Date and Codd, "Relational and Network Approaches," 95.
43. Everest, "Futures of Database Management"
44. Codd and Date, "Interactive Support"
45. Date and Codd, "Relational and Network Approaches"
46. Sibley, "On the Equivalences."
47. Thomas Haigh, "Charles W. Bachman: Database Software Pioneer," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33, no. 4 (2011): 70-80.
48. The Turing Award is given annually by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) "to an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field" (http://awards.acm.org/homepage.cfm?awd=140).
49. Panel and Audience, "Discussion," in Proceedings of the 1974 ACM SIGFIDET. Data Models, 123, 134, 128.
50. Ibid., 137, 132. In the context of CODASYL, a debate had been on going since 1959 over programming languages that could be used on a range of computers regardless of the manufacturer. In 1969 the Data Base Task Group published the first description of a language for the network database model. Vis-à-vis the work on CODASYL at the time of the debate between Codd and Bachman, see "CODASYL Data Description Language Committee: CODASYL Data Description Language," Journal of Development (1973).
51. See also T. William Olle, The Codasyl Approach to Data Base Management (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1978)
52. and J. S. Knowles and D. M. R. Bell, "The Codasyl Model," in Databases-Role and Structure: An Advanced Course, ed. Peter M. Stocker et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
53. Panel and Audience, "Discussion," 132.
54. Charles W. Bachman, interview by Thomas Haigh, September 25-26, 2004, Tucson, Arizona. Interview conducted for the Special Interest Group on the Management of Data (SIGMOD) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Transcript and original tapes donated to the Charles Babbage Institute. ACM Oral History Interviews (2006): 104.
55. Thomas J. Bergin and Thomas Haigh, "The Commercialization of Data Base Management Software 1969-85," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31, no. 4 (2009): 26-41.
56. See also Thomas Haigh, "How Data Got Its Base: Generalized Information Storage Software in the 1950s and 1960s," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31, no. 4 (2009): 6-25.
57. James A. Weeldreyer and Oris D. Friesen, "Multics Relational Data Store: An Implementation of a Relational Data Base Manager," in Eleventh Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, January 5-6, 1978, 52-66.
58. See Bachman, interview, 2.
59. J. N. Gray et al., "Granularity of Locks in a Large Shared Database," in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Framingham, Mass., ACM, 1975 (Framingham, MA: ACM, 1975): "The ideas presented here were developed in the process of designing and implementing an experimental data base system at the IBM San Jose Research Laboratory. (We wish to emphasize that this system is a vehicle for research in data base architecture, and does not indicate plans for future IBM products)" (447).
60. Bachman, interview, 19
61. Haigh, "Inventing Information Systems."
62. Christopher J. Date, "Edgar F. Codd. August 23rd, 1923-April 18th, 2003," SIGMOD Record 32 (2003): 4-13.
63. Morton M. Astrahan and Donald D. Chamberlin, "Implementation of a Structured English Query Language," Communications of the ACM 18 (1975): 580.
64. See also Codd, "Relational Model"
65. Edgar F. Codd, "Relational Completeness of Data Base Sublanguages," in Data Base Systems, ed. Courant Computer Science Symposia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971), 65-98
66. Edgar F. Codd, "A Data Base Sublanguage Founded on the Relational Calculus," in 1971 ACM SIGFIDET Workshop, 1971, 35-68.
67. Astrahan and Chamberlin, "Implementation," 580.
68. The description is based on Chamberlin et al., "History and Evaluation."
69. Astrahan and Chamberlin, "Implementation."
70. Chamberlin et al., "History and Evaluation," 636.
71. Ibid. On IBM's internal definition of "user orientation," see the corresponding entry in the IBM Jargon and General Computing Dictionary: "user orientation n. A term for the kind of manual now described as user friendly. This was first used in 1968 at a meeting of hardware publications managers, when it was stated that the greatest need was for publications developers to under stand who the readers were and why they were readers. It took fifteen years for this truth to be widely appreciated and applied" (Mike Cowlishaw, IBM Jargon and General Computing Dictionary [Winchester, UK, 1990], 57). The (ex post) stated objective of the project was, in part, as follows: "(1) To provide a high-level, nonnavigational user interface for maximum user productivity and data independence⋯. (3) To support a rapidly changing database environment, in which tables, indexes, views, transactions, and other objects could easily be added to and removed from the database without stopping the system⋯. (6) To provide a flexible mechanism whereby different views of stored data can be defined and various users can be authorized to query and update these views. (7) To support all of the above functions with a level of performance comparable to existing lower-function database systems" (Chamberlin et al., "History and Evaluation," 633).
72. Rudolf Bayer and Edward McCreight, "Organization and Maintenance of Large Ordered Indexes," Acta Informatica 1 (1972): 173-89
73. "Symmetric Binary B-Trees: Data Structure and Maintenance Algorithms," Acta Informatica 1 (1972): 290-306.
74. Stephen Todd, "The Peterlee Relational Test Vehicle-a System Overview," IBM Systems Journal 15, no. 4 (1976): 285-308.
75. Chamberlin et al., "History and Evaluation," 634.
76. Paul McJones lists around forty-five articles at "Bibliography of the System R Project," http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/bib.html (December 4, 2000).
77. Paul McJones has compiled an incomplete list of the most prominent developers at "(Some) people who worked on System R and related systems," http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/people.html.
78. IBM development projects were strikingly different in terms of prestige, resources, and urgency. Representative labels included Hobby, Adtech, and Strategic Project. In the mid-1970s System R was classified under Adtech. In the IBM Jargon and General Computing Dictionary, Adtech was described as "Advanced Technology. Time put aside for a risky project, not necessarily directly related to a product. May mean: a) Play time (when someone else is doing it), or b) Exciting, innovative system design with no product deadlines (when speaker is doing it)" (Cowlishaw, IBM Jargon and General Computing Dictionary, 3).
79. United States National Research Council, Funding a Revolution, 162-68. INGRES stands for Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System. Michael Stonebraker et al., "The Design and Implementation of INGRES," ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) 1 (1976): 189-222.
80. Michael Stonebraker, "Retrospection on a Database System," ACM Transactions on Database Systems 5 (1980): 225-40, 228.
81. "In order to provide a useful host-language capability, it was decided that System R should support both PL/I and Cobol application programs as well as a standalone query interface, and that the system should run under either the VM/CMS or MVS/TSO operating system environment" (Chamberlin et al., "History and Evaluation," 636). On hardware and the UNIX environment of the INGRES project, see Stonebraker, "Retrospection."
82. Stonebraker, "Retrospection," 232.
83. Ibid., 228.
84. Ibid.; Michael Stonebraker and Gerald Held, "B-Trees Re-examined," Communications of the ACM 21 (1978): 139-43. The INGRES group later rethought the decision in favor of B-trees.
85. See Michael Stonebraker and Lawrence A. Rowe, "The Commercial INGRES Epilogue," in The INGRES Papers: Anatomy of a Relational Database System, ed. Michael Stonebraker (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1986), 63-82, 76.
86. This also shows the unexpectedly large number of papers submitted to the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, which took place in September 1975 in Framingham, Massachusetts. See Proceedings of the 1st International Conference.
87. Which meant, not least, that Codd had to continually publish new versions of his "original" concept. See Gerald Held in the foreword to Stonebraker, The INGRES Papers. Moreover, Codd seems to have been little involved in the developmental work on System R. The IBM developers' habit of referring to Codd as the founding father of the community must also be related to his being kept at arm's length from the project.
88. Stonebraker, "Retrospection," 230.
89. K. P. Eswaran and D. D. Chamberlin, "Functional Specifications of a Sub system for Database Integrity," in Proceedings of the Conference: "To form a good basis for integrity control, a data sublanguage should be high level, non-procedural, relationally complete, and should allow for the description and manipulation of sets of tuples, or records, in a single statement" (53).
90. See also E. Allman et al., "Embedding a Relational Data Sublanguage in a General Purpose Programming Language," ACM SIGMOD Record-Proceedings of the Conference on Data: Abstraction, Definition and Structure 8 (1976): "A high level, non-procedural language, QUEL, for database query and update has been implemented in INGRES" (25).
91. Stonebraker et al., "Design and Implementation," 191.
92. Astrahan and Chamberlin, "Implementation," 582.
93. Arnold E. Keller, "The Man behind Systems at Shell Oil," Business Automation 7 (1962): 20-24, cited in Thomas Haigh, "'A Veritable Bucket of Facts': Origins of the Data Base Management System," SIGMOD Record 35 (2006): 34.
94. Alfred Eisenpreis, "Beispiele der Zusammenarbeit von Theorie und Praxis in einem Handelsunternehmen," in Wissenschaft und Handel: Der Brückenschlag zwischen Theorie und Praxis, 4.-7. Juli 1966 in Rüschlikon-Zürich, ed. William Applebaum (Bern, 1967), 133, my translation.
95. For a discussion of the role computers played for the transformation of banking in the last third of the twentieth century, see David Gugerli, "Data Banking: Computing and Flexibility in Swiss Banks 1960-90," in Financial Markets and Organizational Technologies, ed. Alexandros-Andreas Kyrtsis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 117-36.
96. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1974), 5.
97. "I think that a narrator, as well as a poet, should never provide interpretations of his own work. A text is a machine conceived for eliciting interpretations" (Umberto Eco, "An Author and His Interpreters," in Reading Eco: An Anthology, ed. Rocco Capozzi [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997], 59).
98. Barthes, S/Z, 5-6.
99. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)
100. Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Picador, 1996), 3-14
101. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen, 1975).
102. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?," in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 148
103. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," Aspen, nos. 5-6 (1967)
104. and Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa (Konstanz, 1970).
105. See also Harald Weinrich, "Für eine Literaturgeschichte des Lesers," in Literatur für Leser, ed. Harald Weinrich (Stuttgart, 1971), 23-34.
106. Dieter E. Sattler, ed., Friedrich Hölderlin: Sämtliche Werke. Frankfurter Ausgabe, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), 16-20.
107. http://www.hoelderlin.de/materialien/html/marginalien.html.
108. Eco, The Open Work, 90.
109. Gil Grissom in "Toe Tags," CSI, May 10, 2006, season 7, episode 3.