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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

In recent years, database narrative has thrived as a nonfiction form.  The aggregation of data around known or culturally shared histories, places, events and personas can engage as narrative in ways that are more difficult for strictly fictional database narratives.  Even a community database (http://www.flickr.com/groups/shoottherecession/pool/) of photographs tracking the aftermath of the 2008 US economic crises creates a form of narrative experience for a user with a degree of prior knowledge and/or shared context.  Narrative engagement happens as a consequence of exploring a given set of knowns (data) and speculating about or imaginatively filling in the unknowns (missing data). In this sense, the database narrative shares the long history of visual or spatial narrative arts.  Narrative painting and architecture, while lacking a narrator’s control of temporal sequencing, uses formal techniques to spatialize episodes and scenes from known stories and historical events and leaves the narrating to the viewer.  Any narrative (fiction or nonfiction) that references a shared world can benefit from the “database” of knowledge about that world. However, a fiction demands a certain amount of structural work —the design and construction of plot, character, setting and event into a believable world.

The cultural explosion of “database logic,” in the 12 years since Manovich’s landmark “The Language of New Media,” continues to challenge our understanding of narrative form as primarily a sequential art. The distinction Manovich makes,”database and narrative are natural enemies”, is not about the incompatibility of the two tendencies, but about how a communicative act falls on a spectrum: between the granularity of the database and the linearity of narrative. In any discussion about the compatibility of these two tendencies, definitions and categories become slippery because narrative forms slide along these and many other spectrums.  “Database” refers to the unique nonlinear capabilities of a computer: complex networks, hyperlinking of data, instant retrieval, random access, etc. And yet, a computer database is fully capable of delivering linear plot as discrete narrative units. A TV series on a website or DVD is a kind of database narrative. Narratives in traditional media (novels, theater, film) can have database-like depths of allusion and intertexuality.  But typically, the usefulness and pleasures of plot as a unifying device is significantly weakened in a computer’s networked and nonlinear environment. In the navigation of a database, temporal ordering is handed over to the user, rendering familiar techniques of engagement, such as foreshadowing and suspense, ineffective.  

Without plot, what holds a database fiction together as a conceptual whole?  Narratives that dismantle, displace or otherwise diminish the structural role of plot —as in many non-Western and non-mimetic narrative traditions—also engage the attentive mind as single entities (narratives).  It is usually through the patterns, gaps, rhythms and repetitions in the material surface of the work. The discursive style, narrative voice and spatial design. In other words, the interface.

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