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Database | Narrative | Archive

Seven interactive essays on digital nonlinear storytelling
edited by Matt Soar & Monika Gagnon

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Plotting the Database Narrative

The cultural explosion of “database logic,”continues to challenge notions of narrative as a primarily sequential and mimetic art. The line Manovich draws,”database and narrative are natural enemies,” is not about the incompatibility of two tendencies, but about how a communicative act falls on a spectrum: between the modularity of the database and the linearity of narrative. Narrative forms have always slid along these and many other spectrums.  Typically, a narrative such as novel or movie, presents an ordered selection of data (a plot) from a sizeable database of source material, influences and contingencies. Alternately, a database foregrounds the relational aspects of data and datasets and hides narrative sequencing.  But a computer database is fully capable of delivering linear plots and plotted narratives can have database-like depths of recursion and intertexuality. 

Despite the slipperiness of terms, the usefulness and pleasures of plot, as a structural and unifying narrative device, is significantly weakened in a computer’s networked and modular environment. Search, fast retrieval, user control of temporal ordering--the qualities that make databases unique--leave plot effects, such as foreshadowing and suspense, ineffective.Without plot, what holds a database narrative together as a conceptual and experiential whole?  What models in contemporary and past narrative forms can help us invent a more affective-expressives poetics for the design of database narratives; a poetics less reliant on plot devices, cause/effect chains and central conflicts?  Plotless narratives, or forms that ignore, dismantle, or diminish the structural role of plot, can also engage the attentive mind as single entities (stories).  Cohesiveness comes less through the codes of mimetic construction--the propping up of a world--and more through the patterns, gaps, rhythms and repetitions in the material surface of the work. In other words, through the interface.



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