Time is the storyteller’s canvas: the sequential ordering of events in the narration (the syntagm) and in the story world (the paradigm), creates a network of relational meanings between sequences and events. A beginning relates to an end.  Sequences can be parallel in structure, design or editing. Sequences can be embedded inside one another.  In a database narrative, relations between time sequences can can be presented linearly—“The king died and the queen died of grief”— or in a loop“The king died.” 

Story time can drag, speed up, slow-down become tense with expectation. In a told tale, a novel or a movie the subjectivity of time is an aspect of plotting, of building structure and character. Suspense is a technique that uses our own memory of time to build an identification with character. Boredom, anxiety, fear can be designed into a movie sequence’s mise en scene and editing style so that we can feel what the character is thinking. How can these affective-expressive uses of time frames and eventness work inside a database? It is the nature of database narratives to allow for quick scanning or lingering at certain nodes. Adrian Miles,the anxiety of link…

Scott McCloud in his understanding comics writes about the graphic display of time through the relationship between panels, the gutter, the missing information…While a database narrative loses the control of sequence and linear cause-and-effect chains,  it can gain new dimensions not only in how individual micro-narratives relate to each other, but how those relations can be portrayed within an abstract mental space, an interface. 

Entry points can do a lot of the work to create time frames and hierarchies of events that will inform the user through the exploration of the database.

The database is a mirror not of the world, but perhaps out of how we orient our minds to the world. The past and the present can be in front of us simultaneously. In an interface we use nested frames of either images or video to show relations between events that would be difficult to describe linearly. A spatial understanding of time does not necessarily have to have the clarity and accessibility of most information design and data displays. Much of this speculation about the role of interface in replacing plot is a way to think of new kinds of stories, new ways of opening up the world and experience. Drawing on familiar plots from legacy media is inevitable and it will take some time to understand the database nature of our own minds and the ways in which time frames are held within the neural networks.