The Plot and The Interface
According Earl Miner, plot at its most elemental is a narrative device for moving a set of characters through a series of related events. Plot helps a sequential story stand up in the mind as a single entity; a contemplative whole made of structurally related parts: cause and effect chains, points of tension and release, beginnings, middles and ends. Each significant moment or “plot point” in a linear narrative provides a kind of virtual interface for the developing story world, the conflicting and harmonious energies (character desires) moving through the whole of the text.
While plot and interface perform similar roles of providing interaction and cohesion in their respective domains (time and space), they are at odds when it comes to the pleasures of story. Plot focuses the attention of a mostly passive “audience” held captive by an illusion. Plot delights, puzzles, frustrates and excites through a selective revealing and concealing of information over time.
While plot and interface perform similar roles of providing interaction and cohesion in their respective domains (time and space), they are at odds when it comes to the pleasures of story. Plot focuses the attention of a mostly passive “audience” held captive by an illusion. Plot delights, puzzles, frustrates and excites through a selective revealing and concealing of information over time.
An interface is a spatial rather than temporal narrative device, but it is more than a map. An interface “plots” the relationships between data. A database, a website's server for example, is made of segmented or chunked semantic units. The smaller and more modular the units, the more useful the database. Words, sentences, paragraphs, documents, photos, videos and audio files are the tagged data on a server that becomes unified through an interface-- a partial view of the set. It is only through an interface that a user can see and interact with data, structure and metadata.
“No database can function without a user interface, and in the case of cultural materials the interface is an especially crucial element of these kinds of digital instruments. Interface embeds, implicitly and explicitly, many kinds of hierarchical and narrativized organizations. Indeed, the database—any database—represents an initial critical analysis of the content materials, and while its structure is not narrativized, it is severely constrained and organized. The free play offered to the user of such environments is at least as much a function of interface design as it is of its data structure . . .” - Jerome Mcgann
An interface is typically designed to be useful. It provides the database user with access, fast retrieval and possibilities for data manipulation. An interface that frustrates any of these is said to be poorly designed.
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