Plot's temporal ordering of events sets up networks of relational meanings. A beginning relates to an end.  Scenes can be coded as parallel or in contrast. Sequences can be embedded inside one another. Story time can speed up, then slow down again. A scene can become tense with the anticipation of future events. In other words, plotting is more than just a logic of continuance; it also provides affective meanings through relational structures.  Boredom, calm, suspense, relief, anxiety, fear can be designed into a narrative's rhythm and pacing so that the viewer/reader/listener can both know and feel what characters are experiencing. How can such affective-expressive uses of time frames work in an interface?

Early in Shaun Tan’s graphic novel, “The Arrival”, there is a double-page spread showing a grid of clouds. In the context of the story, the grid makes visible on macro and micro levels, the passage of time, the loneliness of travel, the longing for home, boredom, the small changes that each day brings. The point of view of the protagonist is implied, not articulated. There is no image of the man looking up at the sky. The reader, turning the page to the clouds, is momentarily without narrative bearing as the clouds invoke a subject-less reverie of "passing days." Compared with a more mimetic approach–a single image of the protagonist sitting alone in thought–the grid is relational on many levels: as a simultaneous view of distinct days in the story world, and as a confluence between the narration, the reader and the object of attention; an affective-expressive identification that is not attached to a single point of view.

Because database narratives are often made of smaller narrative units that are organized for nonlinear access, networked rather than sequential, chronology must be communicated through graphical devices such as a timelines and timestamps.  Such methods of navigating time are common in database narratives and are effective at imparting temporal information, but they do not work very well for narrative engagement, unless the timeline hides as much as it reveals.  An interface is perhaps more engaging when displaying subjective time through spatial relationships in the layout. For example, a smaller frame embedded
within a larger frame can spatially denote a flashback. Narratives nested within other narratives, mise en abyme, can act both as framing devices–for how to read one narrative structure in light of another– but also as a metaphor for recursion; for how to read through the database narrative work as a whole.

For example, an interface that contains two or more video panels playing at different speeds presents time as relational. What kinds of effects might simultaneous sequences have in a narrative experience. The spatial montage on our computers screens, televisions and increasingly at the movies, may be no different than parallel action film editing. We can read two or more discrete panels on a screen as relational and continuous with the action of events depicted, and can be decoded as an omniscient point of view. But spacial montage of distinct spaces, that do not appear continuous in representational space,
require a different kind of narrative attention; an attention that is more focused on relations between events and subjects than distinct entities.

It has been said that at least two discrete events are needed for a narrative and that those events need to be related in some way. Manovich writes about the loop as unique to new media and how the loop, driven by an algorithm, is itself emblematic of database logic. What narrative meaning is there in a loop? A loop is a computational effect that has not to seems to be outside the codes of narrative.  But a loop embedded within an interface can be a point of attention and meaning and even thought-processes.  If we think of the interface as primarily a semiotic space that includes representational spaces such as photograph and videos, what is the role of loops? We have narrative codes of speeded up actions and reversed actions in movies. Is there semantic meaning, and more importantly relational meaning that can be exploited, in the loop?