Of little databases and the poetics of the web revival
Faculty First Person
Stephanie Yantz for UCLA Humanities
In courses like “Algo-Lit: A Critical Introduction to AI Literature” and “Web Writing Workshop,” Danny Snelson (standing) and his students develop creative and experimental approaches to generative AI and internet culture.
| June 10, 2025
Danny Snelson is a UCLA assistant professor of English and design media arts. His research and teaching blend a study of poetry and poetics with work on digital and network cultures, material text studies and media theory. His latest book, “The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats,” will be published June 24 by the University of Minnesota Press. Learn more about his work at his website.
This quarter, I taught a new creative writing seminar called “Web Writing Workshop,” or WWW for short. My students are creating glitchy pixel art, pop-up ads, culture-jamming sites, fan fic stories and GIF-laden horoscopes — among a wide array of creative works that might seem more at home in the 1990s than the 2020s.
Despite the anachronism of their aesthetics, I remain astounded by how urgently these works speak to the challenges of the present.
Their creations offer a glimpse of an internet that might have developed differently, and an idea of how we might still envision alternatives to the present. The poetic forms they employ hail from 30 years ago: splash pages, marquee animations, custom cursors and a density of ridiculous GIFs set upon glittering backgrounds, to name but a few markers of this trend.
These forms have come back into currency amid the “web revival” movement, as young digital artists and writers return to the GeoCities aesthetics of an earlier internet — long before streaming immediacy, social media ubiquity and the emergence of generative AI platforms. And long before the internet’s “big five” of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft came to track every data point and lord over every life lived online.
For students who came of age during the era of the always-on internet, subject to the pervasive dataveillance and impenetrable filter bubbles of social media dominance, an earlier internet holds the unique appeal of so much that has been lost: autonomy, creativity and weirdness, yes, but also new ways of learning technical expertise, activist media practices, collaborative community networks and the DIY ethos that the web might become whatever we make of it.
The course website from Snelson’s Web Writing Workshop (top left), with three sites created by students. The artwork may evoke the internet of the 1990s, but the sites speak to the present moment.
‘Vibe coding’
In the WWW seminar, my students and I are working to bring back the creative forms of a more intimate and less regulated internet from the unique vantage of the present.
But we’re making this work with a difference: Most of the work produced uses generative AI practices of what’s popularly known as “vibe coding.” That is, rather than write code from scratch, we use a feedback loop that bridges algorithmically generated code with handwritten content. In this way, English students with no coding experience are able to create sophisticated interactive websites, fully operational video games, and other web-based media that just two years ago would be impossible to produce without years of training.
In the course, we work from a “critical AI” framework: carefully selecting small, local and open-source language models for data privacy, ecological imperatives and platform politics. We process private collections of home photos and historic zines through the aesthetic and poetic properties of an earlier internet, all while using cutting-edge generative AI tools and other creative forms of synthetic cognition. We traverse vast online collections of 20th-century art and letters to create new interventions within a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
We reinvent the present by remediating the past — our personal and collective collections intertwined with media old and new.
These are weird times: Turing tests are being broken while AI slop pours out across the technofeudal platforms that have all but leveled and commercialized what was once known as the “digital commons.” This process has initiated what Matthew Kirschenbaum has hailed as a “textpocalypse” — a stochastic storm of generative spam clogging up the information channels we’ve become accustomed to over the past three decades.
Within this milieu, my WWW students are like medieval scribes equipped with self-driving quills or Beat poets improvising with autonomous typewriters: They are using the technologies of the day to reinvent alternative futures rooted in the past.
Making sense of a shifting landscape
In “The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats,” I offer contingent reading strategies and creative methods to help make some sense of this always-evolving media landscape. In the book, I pay particular attention to the legacy of the historical avant-gardes and media-specific arts and letters given the unlikely afterlives they’ve come to find on the internet. I sometimes say that the book works to “see what we’re seeing” when we encounter digitized works online. It’s also a project about personal collections of meaningful digital objects — both big and little — that populate public web servers and personal hard drives alike.
Let me take a step back. I started the project not as a scholar, but as a scanner. Back in the 2000s, I was a Princeton undergraduate working under the supervision of my professor, Craig Dworkin, to digitize experimental and small-press poetry publications from the 1970s on a website called Eclipse. With the same 30-year remove that my students now have from the ’90s, I was mystified and inspired by the era of Xerox print-based distribution, hermetic poetic traditions and the DIY ethos of the “mimeograph revolution.”
I spent my graduate, postdoctoral and junior faculty years following up on the insights from these formative encounters at the scanner — on what it means to remediate or transcode artifacts from an earlier era to the digital networks of the present.
In the book, I discuss my own archival practices alongside scholarly readings and creative performances of media poetics. I found, increasingly, that my own hard drive came to resemble the sites I had worked to build, the same ones that I study in my book: Eclipse, a repository of experimental print artifacts; PennSound, a collection of audio recordings of poetry; UbuWeb, a sprawling aggregator of avant-garde materials; and the EPC, a hub for electronic poetry.
Finding playful modes of engagement
While trying to wrap my mind around the contents of these sites, I discovered that the only way to properly “read” their collections was to produce new poetic interventions with their contents. Working with digital archives that are at once too big for close reading and too idiosyncratic for meaningful data analytics, I began to develop an intermediary category of scale that I’ve termed the “little database.” While the term operates against the reign of “big” data, it also echoes the “little magazines” of modernism and the historical avant-gardes, which have long posed similar methodological challenges.
Resisting analytics and advocating for site-specific forms of reading, the book seeks to find new, playful modes of engagement with digital collections that mirror the processes of accumulation, modulation and circulation that define our cultural memory reconfigured for the technologies of the present.
In this context, “The Little Database” seeks passages into the meaningful interpretation of historical cultural materials that have somehow found their way into all manner of localized collections. I tune into the eerie resonances produced by the digital afterlives of avant-garde artworks to try to understand what we see when we look at a photo of a photo of a loved one on our devices, caught within the swirling tides of the internet and just as unmoored from its origins as it is bound to new relations among folder hierarchies and encoding protocols.
With the book’s publication just days away, I’m struck by a cyclical irony: My obsession with studying the media-reflexive practices of the 20th century in order to reimagine the digital networks of the 21st century has come to mirror the ways in which my students conceive of the early internet as a model to creatively reinvent the future.
In a precarious and uncertain present, this cycle gives me some comfort. In my students’ liberatory GIFs and resistant pop-ups, I catch a glimmer of the digital era’s promise beyond the pitfalls.
In “The Little Database,” I hope to bottle as much of that glimmer as I can hold, and to signpost where new creative cycles might find root. Not just in surfacing the aesthetics of the web revival or the poetics of interpreting a collection, but to enact new ways of understanding cultural memory on everyday platforms, and, most importantly, how these new understandings can help us to imagine ordinary digital life otherwise.
Read more about Danny Snelson
UCLA storytellers use Grand Theft Auto as basis for series of original films imagining L.A. in 2050