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 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 database novel, "Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry" is a love story in the form of an auction catalog of objects. The narrative not only has a long title to help frame the narrative, but an entry point that orients the reader/user’s attention to certain narrative threads. A note from Harold to Lenore hints at missed love: "It would be good to see you. I've written letters to you, but they are still here in my drawer."
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.
Missing data dictates the what, how and why of a database's existence. A database is, typically, organized around relational aspects of data. That is, the selection process and tagging system of a dataset is foregrounded so that information retrieval can happen quickly and efficiently. A set that has no apparent relations between items or whose relational categories are not clearly available, raises questions. What makes these items a set? Who made this set and why? How is one supposed to use this set? A collection or archive can be based on proximity (the contents of a drawer) or on culturally defined categories (antique European furniture) or on a collector’s own tastes and whims (cabinets of curiosity).
Like any linear narrative, the selection and identification of the relational sets of a database tells its own story; what is included and excluded is always a culturally and politically informed process. A census, for example, might segment human beings into categories—race, religion or sexual-orientation—that may not translate across cultural narratives of identity.
A participatory database of photographs, tracking the aftermath of the 2008 US economic crises, creates a form of narrative experience for a user with a degree of prior knowledge and/or shared context. Narrative engagement happens as a consequence of exploring a given set of knowns (data) and speculating about or imaginatively filling in the unknowns (missing data). In this sense, the database narrative shares the long history of visual or spatial narrative arts. Narrative painting and architecture, while lacking a narrator’s control of temporal sequencing, uses formal techniques to spatialize episodes and scenes from known stories and historical events and leaves the narrating to the viewer. Any narrative (fiction or nonfiction) that references a shared world can benefit from the “database” of knowledge about that world.
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.
Missing data dictates the what, how and why of a database's existence. A database is, typically, organized around relational aspects of data. That is, the selection process and tagging system of a dataset is foregrounded so that information retrieval can happen quickly and efficiently. A set that has no apparent relations between items or whose relational categories are not clearly available, raises questions. What makes these items a set? Who made this set and why? How is one supposed to use this set? A collection or archive can be based on proximity (the contents of a drawer) or on culturally defined categories (antique European furniture) or on a collector’s own tastes and whims (cabinets of curiosity).
Like any linear narrative, the selection and identification of the relational sets of a database tells its own story; what is included and excluded is always a culturally and politically informed process. A census, for example, might segment human beings into categories—race, religion or sexual-orientation—that may not translate across cultural narratives of identity.
A participatory database of photographs, tracking the aftermath of the 2008 US economic crises, creates a form of narrative experience for a user with a degree of prior knowledge and/or shared context. Narrative engagement happens as a consequence of exploring a given set of knowns (data) and speculating about or imaginatively filling in the unknowns (missing data). In this sense, the database narrative shares the long history of visual or spatial narrative arts. Narrative painting and architecture, while lacking a narrator’s control of temporal sequencing, uses formal techniques to spatialize episodes and scenes from known stories and historical events and leaves the narrating to the viewer. Any narrative (fiction or nonfiction) that references a shared world can benefit from the “database” of knowledge about that world.
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