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
Withheld or missing data in a story—the background of the characters, the off-screen or offstage action, motivations, unspoken thoughts, the hidden influences on the plot, the cultural contexts of the telling—are essential for story to be present in the mind. Manovich writes that it is syntagm and paradigm that get flipped in database logic. Paradigm, the multiple relational aspects of story elements, becomes visible in a database and syntagm, narrative sequence, is suppressed. However, the interface can be thought of as a syntagmatic space that can also surpress data, hide relations and structure absence. 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 temporal or spatial 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 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. Like the fragmentation and ellipses in modernist and postmodern fiction, a database fiction might benefit from confusion about categories, selection processes and even the reliability of navigation tools. Data that is excluded might call attention to and form queries about its narrative importance. The limitations and constraints in the amount of data might make exploration more accessible and focus attention.
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. In a "database love story", as in this work, there is 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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