The sequential ordering of events in the narration (the syntagm) and in the story world (the paradigm), creates a network of relational meanings. A beginning relates to an end.  Events in a series can be coded as parallel or in contrast. Sequences can be embedded inside one another. 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 subjective memory of time to build an identification with character. Boredom, anxiety, fear can be designed into a movie sequence’s mise en scene, pacing 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.

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. 

In Shaun Tan’s, “The Arrival”, there is a double-page spread showing images of clouds. In the context of the story, the simple grid makes visible on macro and micro levels, the passage of time, the loneliness of travel, the longing for home, boredom, the change that each day brings. In fact, the associations spill over the narrative container—a man traveling by ship to a new land—as we have the leisure to think of our own experience of passing days. Compared with a single image of the protagonist sitting alone in thought, this image is not only more effective as narrative device, it presents a distributed persona; an affective-expressive identification that is not attached to a single point of view; an identity without a body.

Because database narratives are often made of smaller narrative units, networked rather than sequential events, chronology must happen through graphical devices such as a timelines or progress bars or meta tags such as date and time. 

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.