The DALN Database Toolkit

This exhibit offers a "heuristic toolbox" of data files and visualizations that allow visitors to read the DALN database relationally, moving back and forth between reading (or viewing, listening to) individual narratives and reading the network of relationships among them, relationships encoded in their metadata and in the narratives themselves, awaiting the combination of interpretive inquiry and database operations to make them manifest. Because the toolkit enables readers to manipulate the information in the database using computational tools—sorting, plotting, and calculating the values of thousands of records interactively in order to discover, for example, which narratives have been downloaded most often, which are set in particular geographic places, or which employ the word literacy in particular phrases or grammatical constructions—it enables alternative strategies for relating and understanding the narratives in the DALN. Those alternatives may help, in Katherine Hayles's words, "test the generality" of any interpretation we might construct of a single narrative against a wide range of other narratives arranged paradigmatically along some axis of difference represented by a database field (e.g., the narrator's gender, socioeconomic status, age, nationality, language use, or description of his or her own story). Or more simply, alternately reading the database in this fashion and reading narratives in the database provides a means of placing narratives in contexts we might not otherwise consider or construct. Thus, reading relationally may help us avoid finding only those meanings we seek. After all, two of the most characteristic and unique features of the DALN, at least in the world of literacy studies, are its instantiation as a digital database and the fact that many different individuals have recorded and described its contents (to date, 2,544 people have registered to submit narratives to the DALN). As Franco Moretti argues in regard to his quantitative analyses of other scholars' bibliographic compilations, "since we are all eager to find what we are looking for, using the evidence gathered by other scholars, with completely different research programmes, is always a good corrective to one's desires" (18). Something similar comes into play when we read the DALN database relationally.

The remainder of this exhibit argues for the heuristic value of reading the DALN database from six different perspectives aligned with aspects of the DALN data described above: random, messy, emergent, intersecting, multifaceted, and fluid. Each of the following sections provides one or more examples of reading from a particular perspective as well as tools for reading from that perspective, some of which are embedded in the exhibit, others of which require downloading a supplemental file and opening it in a separate browser window or another application such as a spreadsheet.

Readers can, of course, read through this exhibit without pausing in order to gain a quick overview of the approach to reading the DALN database modeled here. To explore relational reading more fully, readers will want to pause at various points to work with the tools provided in each section, perhaps in conjunction with (re)reading other exhibits in this collection or other literacy narratives in the DALN. Recommended points for pausing to work with the tools are marked with this symbol: . Instructions for using each tool are provided in this text or in the file(s) associated with the tool.¹