A user chooses when and where to exit a database narrative. The entrance is always fixed and designed. Whether the opening interface is a broad, restricted or randomly generated set of data and paths, the user must pass through a staged entry. Entry points can establish narrative frames and genre, present views of data sets, describe elements of plot, character, setting or theme—or withhold any and all of these.  However the interface is designed, the entry point to a database narrative prepares the user for interaction and most importantly the desire for interaction.

Peter Greenway’s mock documentary and database-like film, opens with an explanation and visual representation of its segmented structure. As a narrator introduces the subject, an alphabetical list of names scrolls up the frame.  A vague bureaucratic committee, personified by the authoritative male voice, has organized an objective and methodical investigation of the effects of a violent unknown event or “V.U.E..” We learn that names on the list, selected from a much larger list, are 92 victims of “V.U.E.” that will be the subjects of mini-documentaries, presented in their alphabetical order. While seeming to take extreme efforts at filtering subjectivity, the authors of the documentary are also withholding crucial information: what was the violent unknown event and why the use of an acronym?  The entry point, the first few minutes of the film, sets up a narrative schema around possible conspiracy, an attempt to select, filter and possibly cover up an event—a chaotic eruption of natural forces. The V.U.E acts as a traditional MacGuffin, a plot element that will do much to sustain (and strain) narrative interest and focused attention throughout the 182 minute film. To solve the mystery of V.U.E, the viewer must pay attention to an abundance of visual and verbal evidence from a very long, digressive and contingent documentary about the victims, and imaginatively fill in missing data. Despite the attempts to categorize and order events into controlled narrative systems, a human trait the film mocks, the film erupts in a comic excess of linguistic and cinematic styles — a kind of semantic chaos similar to the violence of the event itself. 

The fiction book, “Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry” is a photo catalog of objects that not only has a title to help frame the narrative, but an entry point that orients the reader/user’s attention to certain narrative threads. A note from Harold to Lenore hints at missed love. With this scant information, the reader explores the collection with distributed attention, not really knowing what to look for, but aware that something pushed the lovers apart and the clue might be embedded in the object details and metadata. A love story typically presents the lovers’ inability to get together as a set of obstacles to overcome. Narrative interest is in the struggle for union. But a database love story, as in this work, can have little control over dramatic developments and cause-and-effect chains. The points of attention and interest are in the remainder or excess of the experience of love: the objects shared by the lovers.

In Jonathan Harris’ interactive photo essay “The Whale Hunt,” the entry point, beyond the initial title page, is a grid of small images. This interface itself is indecipherable as image and empty of narrative content, but communicates an ordered map of a database. The title gives away the context, so the user begins to search for meaningful clues in the granular presentation. The grid panels are clearly of a set, but have variations of color. Rolling over the grid, isolates selected images from the whole, increasing their size, but representation remains fuzzy. Clicking the selected image zooms to a micro level, revealing the grid to be made of individual photos of a whale hunt that play as a chronological slideshow. The entry point as an interactive timeline; chronology is embedded as the main interface. But unlike most timelines, it is designed not to reveal too much at once. Curiosity and attention peaks by a slow reveal of data at the micro level. This is what makes “The Whale Hunt” an interesting model for fictional databases that must work to sustain narrative interest through a modular, nonlinear presentation.  Putting together the micro and macro levels of information, the user quickly understands how to navigate at leisure. The depth, scale and structure of the database and the level of control over the navigation is communicated intuitively and effortlessly. The color at the macro level gives clues about emotional content at the micro level: red are the bloody periods of the hunt, blue the relatively calm periods.  A timeline at the bottom of the slideshow presents a heart-rate meter, confirming speculations of periods of calm and excitement.  As interface design, the entry point does not communicate narrative so much as invite the user to explore details in order to uncover narrative. As a non-fiction form about a single event, the database does not need to map plot elements. Unity is given in the action, the participants and the setting of the hunt and all of these can be further filtered and explored at stunning levels of granularity.