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.
“I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone. There’s this man who comes every week…”
The voice of Beckett's Molloy, one might say, is an interface to the character’s database-consciousness. The missing data, erased from the narration for reasons the reader may never understand, is a vacancy “filled” by the consciousness of an active reader with similar self-editing capabilities and a latent database storage of memory.
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.
With this scant information, the reader explores the collection with distributed attention, not really knowing what to look for, but aware that something pushed the lovers apart and the clue might be embedded in the object details and notes. The cataloged objects with attached notes are numbered sequentially and presented for linear reading.
But a catalog with page layouts made of discrete fields of visual data, is made for browsing. Like a database, the pages act as a changing interface to story elements. Browsing though mini-narratives, a reader begins to find patterns and relations outside of linearity. Plot is there--the when, where and how of a love story--but these details are less important than the behavioral patterns detected in the material objects that the couple possessed.
A love story typically presents the lovers’ inability to get together as a set of obstacles to overcome. Narrative interest is in the struggle for union. But a database love story, as in this work, can have little control over dramatic developments and cause-and-effect chains. The points of attention and interest are in the remainder or excess of the love plot.
A love story typically presents the lovers’ inability to get together as a set of obstacles to overcome. Narrative interest is in the struggle for union. But a database love story, as in this work, can have little control over dramatic developments and cause-and-effect chains. The points of attention and interest are in the remainder or excess of the love plot.
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