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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

The cultural explosion of database logic continues to challenge notions of narrative as a primarily sequential and mimetic act of communication. Plot, a narrative device that relies on linearity and mimesis, is particularly effected by the logic of the database. A plotted narrative, such as a novel or movie, holds attention by focusing on delineated characters, motivations and actions through a series of events. Temporal ordering is essential for setting up narrative suspense, schemas, reversals, McGuffins and red herrings. A database, conversely, holds attention through spatial rather than temporal ordering. An interface foregrounds relational aspects of data and datasets and provides macro and micro views of those relations. Temporal order is just one possible set of relations, which means a database is very capable of delivering plot.  Much of serial television online provide users with both modularity–tagged and networked episodes–and linear threads of plot. And, of course, there is a deep and rich history of literary works with database-like depths of modularity, recursion and intertexuality--The Tale of Genji, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, to name a few. 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, the aesthetic constraint on semantic units is temporal and at the other end it is spatial.  Cultural forms have always slid along these and many other spectrums. 

"Database narratives"–narratives that embrace database logic–can certainly draw on the cultural knowledge of plots and plotting to tell stories. But 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-expressive poetics for the design of narratives on a computer; 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).  Cohesion comes less through the codes of mimetic construction–the propping up of a continuous world–and more through the patterns in the semiotic surface of the work. In other words, database logic narrates through an interface.

This Scalar paper will examine features of database interface design that might translate or reformulate the more familiar narrative techniques of plotting.
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