Week 3 Readings

PHP Tutorial
Contained a good deal of information that helped walk me through the basics of creating a form, which is something I'm planning on making in the near future for a personal side project.

PHP/MySQL Tutorial
With this tutorial, I was able to get a better understanding of databases.  Something I am planning on making requires me to be able to view user input (such as addresses) in order to distribute them to other users.  (I am planning on creating an event for a fanclub and will need information, to do a card/ or gift exchange.)  My biggest issue in creating this, would be to get the users input in a form that is easily comprehensible for myself.

I like how it walks you through setting up a database.


"Database as Symbolic Form", Lev Manovich 
" In computer science database is defined as a structured collection of data. The data stored in a database is organized for fast search and retrieval by a computer and therefore it is anything but a simple collection of items. Different types of databases — hierarchical, network, relational and object-oriented — use different models to organize data."

Computer Science and Software engineering were formerly called Data Processing.

"The new media object consists of one or more interfaces to a database of multimedia material"

"The elements on a syntagmatic dimension are related in praesentia, while the elements on a paradigmatic dimension are related in absentia. For instance, in the case of a written sentence, the words which comprise it materially exist on a piece of paper, while the paradigmatic sets to which these words belong only exist in writer's and reader's minds. Similarly, in the case of a fashion outfit, the elements which make it, such as a skirt, a blouse, and a jacket, are present in reality, while pieces of clothing which could have been present instead — different skirt, different blouse, different jacket — only exist in the viewer's imagination. Thus, syntagm is explicit and paradigm is implicit; one is real and the other is imagined."


"Death of the Author" (PDF), Roland Barthes
Not entirely sure how to respond to this in the form of Web.  What I mostly got out of it, is when the Author dies, so does the true means and understanding of the work.  If you take that literally to a Web Page, when the creator dies, the page will also eventually die unless someone takes it up and keeps paying for the domain.