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“Time Can Be Rewritten”: The Doctor, the Book, and the Database

This article considers the relationship between printed books and electronic databases in the television series Doctor Who. It argues that the program uses books to signal strangeness, and suggests that that strangeness is at its height when books behave like databases, and vice versa. Drawing upon work by Marsha Kinder, Jacques Derrida, and Andrew Piper, and with reference to episodes dating from 1963 to 2017, this article examines the complex interrelation of the book and the database in Doctor Who, thus showing how the continuing movement from analogue to digital culture has been reflected in a key popular text.