Missing Data
“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. While plot provides important tags (hero, villain), schemas (goals, obstacles) and navigation instructions (genre), it is ultimately the cognitive and emotional investment of the receiver of plot—the subjective 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.
Like the fragmentation and ellipses in modernist and postmodern fiction, a database fiction might benefit from a certain amount of confusion about categories, selection processes and even the reliability of navigation tools. Witholding information. What narrative threads are there?
Requires a syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic approach to data selection. Data that is excluded might call attention to and form queries about its narrative importance. The limitations in the amount of data might make exploration more accessible and focus attention on the qualities and gaps within of a finite set. Like Haiku poetry where a syllabic constraint generates a list of seemingly unrelated images and sensations that can have lyrical resonance. The aggregation of narrative datasets can open gaps between things and resonate on narrative levels.
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