> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.killscreen.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# The Little Database expands into a desktop directory
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-little-database-expands-into-a-desktop-directory/
- Published: 2026-08-18T21:42:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-18T21:42:21.000Z
- Description: A year after the University of Minnesota Press book, UCLA's Danny Snelson rebuilds its resources as a clickable fake OS—podcasts, reviews, and dozens of small archives included.
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: Danny Snelson, The Little Database, archive, net.art, desktop, Publishing, poetry, ucla, interface

[thelittledatabase.com](https://thelittledatabase.com/?ref=killscreen.com) opens like a computer you don't own: a desktop scattered with icons, ready to be clicked through rather than scrolled. Danny Snelson—writer, editor, and archivist, professor in English and Design Media Arts at UCLA and faculty at the UCLA Game Lab—[announced the site](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbThqiTJdXe/?ref=killscreen.com) in late July as an "Expanded Resources Desktop Directory," marking a year since *The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats* came out from the University of Minnesota Press.

The book argues that small collections—UbuWeb, Textz, the Electronic Poetry Center—do something big archives can't: at their scale, the format and the interface visibly transform the works they hold, and teach us how to read our own hard drives. The site performs the thesis. Instead of a bibliography page, there's a browsable desktop holding dozens of little databases beyond the book's scope, the expanded media-poetics materials, two recorded podcasts, and five reviews from the year since publication (Leonardo, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Oxford's Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, InScriptum, Hyperrhiz). 

Submissions are welcome. Snelson calls it "the last piece of the project, offered for research, pedagogy, or wherever playful encounters with little databases might occur." The replies fixate on the interface—the cursor especially—as much as anything filed inside it, which is the tell that the interface is the argument.

The desktop-as-fiction is a games move. When Killscreen covered [*Hypnospace Outlaw*](https://www.killscreen.com/hypnospace-outlaw-will-turn-internet-police/), the appeal was an operating system with enough texture to live in. Snelson runs the move in reverse—not a fiction dressed as a desktop but scholarship dressed as one, gambling that the pleasure of clicking around is itself a way of reading.

A university-press monograph that ends its life as a toy OS is a good deal for everyone: the research stays citable, and the argument becomes something you can leave open in a window.