Plotting the Database
Plot, a structuring device that depends on both temporal sequencing and mimesis, by database logic. The cultural explosion of database logic continues to challenge notions of narrative as a primarily sequential and mimetic act of communication. The line Manovich draws,”database and narrative are natural enemies,” is not the divide between two incompatible tendencies, but the line of a spectrum. At one end, units of information are presented outside temporal constraints and at the other end, units are inside temporal constraints. Cultural forms have always slid along these and many other spectrums. A plotted narrative, such as a novel or movie, tends to present a sequential selection from a broader paradigmatic set that is the narrative's source material, drafts, story elements, timelines, cultural motifs, etc. Alternately, a database foregrounds the relational aspects of data and datasets, provides macro and micro views of those relations and hides narrative sequencing. And yet, a computer database is fully capable of delivering linear plots. Much of serial television online provide users with tagged and networked episodes that build quite traditional plots. And there is a deep and long history of semi-plotted narratives with database-like depths of modularity, recursion and intertexuality--The Tale of Genji, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses. Despite the slippery terms, the usefulness and pleasures of plot, as a structural and unifying 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 standard 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 narratives on a database; a poetics less reliant on plot devices, cause/effect chains and central conflicts? Plotless narratives, or forms that explode, ignore 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 semiotic surface of the work. In other words, through the interface.
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