Temporal 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 narration'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? Because database narratives are often made of smaller narrative units that are organized for nonlinear access, chronology must be communicated through graphical devices such as a timelines and timestamps.  Such methods of navigating time are common in spatial narratives and are effective at imparting temporal information, but they do not work very well for narrative engagement. An interface is perhaps more engaging when displaying subjective time through spatial relationships in the layout. For example, a small 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.

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.

Like Tan's grid of clouds, multiple loops embedded within a narrative interface can display not a representation of thought, but a field of thought that arises in the reception of a user. The spatial montage on our computers screens, televisions and increasingly at the movies, may be no different than parallel action film editing. Two or more discrete panels on a screen can be read as continuous with the action of events depicted, and can be decoded as simply an omniscient point of view. But a spatial montage of loops requires a different kind of narrative attention; an attention that is more focused on relations between events and subjects than on continuity. Manovich writes about how the loop, driven by an algorithm, is emblematic of database logic. But loops are computational effects that have not yet been fully codified into digital narrative. A loop is useful for making cinematic motion a subtle distraction on a static page with text, as can be seen in embedded online advertisements; and there are loop-like behaviors in the world that offer mimetic possibilities–the lapping of waves, the swaying of branches and copulation, to name a few.  If we think of the interface as primarily a semiotic space that includes multiple representational elements, such as photograph and videos, what is the expressive role of loops? Is there semantic meaning and, more importantly, relational meaning that can be exploited in the loop?

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