Missing Data
“The king died, and the queen died,” is a narrative; “The king died, and the queen died of grief,” is a plot. - E. M. Forster
For plot there needs to be at least two distinct, but related events. Forster's second sentence, “The king died, and the queen died of grief,” is relational. There are invisible threads of narrative formed around the emotional bond between two abstractions: king and queen. The first sentence, “The king died, and the queen died,” a narrative by virtue of an implied sequence, has no narrative schema, no architectural plans to form a world in the mind and remains a sequential abstraction.
A database narrative can also be made of two related elements. An image and some text on a webpage, for example: image.jpg and index.html are two distinct files on a server. They are relational by layout and design elements (css), but also by semantic mark-up in the source code. An HTML page has a minimum structural integrity-the document object model (the DOM)-that creates a document hierarchy, a plotted page with tagged elements that can "speak" with other elements on the page as well as with the rest of the world, wide web. invisible datasets, missing narratives, backstories, cultural codes on the web. Limited sets on a web page link out to the web....A blog post can present a fragment of a plot and weaves into other plots on other pages. HTML5 semantic blocks extends the database nature of the web document .... tagged elements....
“story is generally organized through absence. Put another way, absence is presence. That seems very much at odds with computer data. But think of the problem this way: absence is a kind of aperture.” -Norman M. Klein
Missing data in a story—the background of the characters, the off-screen or offstage action, the unspoken thoughts, the hidden influences on the plot, the cultural contexts of the telling—are essential for story to be present in the mind. Absence is indeed an aperture. We experience story in the brain as a neural network—a field of semantic and sensory effects, of which plot may be one unifying element. The storyteller starts with charged mental data — voices, images, sensations, abstractions—and then arranges selections of data into a material presentation (a narration) so that it can be delivered to an attentive mind. The material form of a story is always the compressed (zipped) version of a living network designed for activation inside other living networks. Story is software. While plot provides the scaffolding, it is ultimately our cognitive and emotional investment—the associations, desires, visualizations, decodings and fast searches—that transforms a mere series of selected details into a story network that is always more than the sum of its parts.
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