database -
grandmother's calendar
nailed
Dincă Valerian
In the first instance, the text sends us to certain things that it evokes together with their real contexts. The first part is in fact a metonymy for the vast field of digitalization of today's world. A field that intertwines the real with the virtual. The second evokes something much more concrete and individualized - a wall calendar. Leaving some ambiguity on its format, it could be a sheet with all the religious holidays marked throughout a year or as a 365-page book, one for each day of the year. It is important to specify: nailed, ie hanging on the wall.
However, the mention of setting the calendar takes us back. The figurative meaning of the expression nailed draws our attention to the unchanging, the lack of evolution, a sufficient inflexibility, a dead end. From now on we are directed towards the field of information and towards two different epochs that the evoked ones symbolize.
Grandma's calendar becomes a symbol of the press, and it is also a revolutionary moment in the democratization of information. But now, compared to digitization, obviously old-fashioned, it opened, in his time, the access of many to information, to the written document, determining their schooling and literacy. The database is a name that involves software, a lot of applications, which hoards the information, organizes and processes it, keeping it at the disposal of some beneficiaries to whom it facilitates as much as possible the access to it. In addition to the huge size of a database, it can benefit from a permanent enrichment and renewal of the organization. It is not nailed but extremely flexible, capable of evolution.
I remember my grandmother. We, the grandchildren, taught her to read and sign (when she retired and was receiving her pension). All her freshly literate life she uttered what was written in a thin book of prayers.
Comment by Corneliu Traian Atanasiu
