Apparently, telling people that you're studying database management is roughly equivalent to telling them you're about to have a root canal. Usually they grimace and say something like: "I'm so sorry--that must be so boring." What I always want to say at this point is something along the lines of "No. If it was boring, I wouldn't bother studying it." Instead, I usually bite my tongue.

People who knew me in my previous professional incarnation, teaching college-level writing with an M.A. in writing, one of those students everyone says "should" get a Ph.D. in English--always seem to be the most surprised by this. Not that I've switched fields--English is, after all, notoriously horrible for job prospects, and adjuncting teaching English is about the lowest of the low--but that I've switched to something so different. Writing is often viewed as creative or even touchy feely. Databases, by contrast, tend to be seen as dry and about as anti-touch-feely as you can get. (And if you're cuddling up with your databases at night...well, I suspect broader society does not view this kindly.) English is the land of "there is no right answer"; databases, as with many other tech fields, seem to have clearcut rules and boundaries.

However, the two are not as dissimilar as you might think. I could give you an incredibly long list as to why I think the overlap is so significant, extolling the virtues of human-centered technical design, the need for effective communication in data design and user interfaces, that they're both essentially "knowledge worker" fields.

Instead, let me explain my shift in two simple words: encyclopedic novel.

Yes, most of you know even less about this concept than databases. And yes, I saw that grimace.

As a writing student, I was (and still remain) fascinated by postmodern writing fiction. (Don't get me wrong; postmodernism in general is fascinating, but I particularly adore postmodern fiction.) This is work that has a certain level of self-awareness, at times tongue-in-cheek, at times downright intellectually snobbish. (James Joyce being more or less the apex of intellectual snobbery, though whether he's a modernist or postmodernist is debatable. Hopefully you at least know who he is.)

Postmodern fiction is, for example, Michael Martone's Blue Guide to Indiana, styled after a travel guide but based around a fictitious version of the United States in which Indiana is its own country. Or the type of stories that use parenthetical asides and footnotes to add to the text. These are not, exactly, texts that many people find enjoyable.

The encyclopedic novel is a certain subset of postmodernism. For example, many people consider David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest to be the greatest encyclopedic novel ever written. Over a thousand pages, the last two hundred or so end notes fleshing out obscure details or sometimes entire conversations from the main text, many things described in an excruciating level of detail. Encyclopedic, as in trying to describe the whole of human experience.

These types of work fascinated me more than any other. They inundate you with detail, at times delightful and at times agonizingly frustrating. The genius in them is both because of the sheer level of observational and writing skill required to gather and present that much detail and their author's amazing abilities at tying ALL of those things together. (IJ being an exquisite example of this. That is, if you don't set it on fire after the first 200 pages.) Something about the in-your-face, uncensored, nearly unfiltered details in these works struck me as truly saying something about the world we live in today--always plugged in, inundated with advertisements, so many details that it's easy to lose your sense of the big picture or overarching narrative arc. We are interrupted; we multi-task while we're multi-tasking. We are nearly always doing something.

Information overload.

Is it really such a far cry from that to information management? To seeing patterns and value within the patterns of information, to wanting to analyze and experiment with it to make it do more than it's capable of doing on its own? To give people the tools to make effective decisions which they would otherwise not make if left to sift through the information on their own?

Pattern recognition. Figuring out how things are put together (or should be to attain their desired effect). Considering always the reader/end-user and how to best encourage or force them in the direction you want. Choosing tools and configurations that help pave the way to that end goal.

These are not dissimilar. I daresay I am better prepared for this than many of my techno-only counterparts, because I have learned to be sharply analytical of things that do not make sense. I have had to revise (or in tech-speak: iterate) sometimes obscene amounts to get the desired result. As with writing, you have to know the rules so that you know when breaking the rules is necessary.

Databases are like puzzles. They're like encyclopedic novels that you must tease apart to filter out the noise and throw into stark relief the salient points. They are not root canals. They are not boring.