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which it depends. In a sense, every “story” the system tells can be responsive to
the unique qualities of the audience that asks for it.
Now that you have an idea of the context that attracted me to this disci-
pline, I must confess that my enthusiasm needs to be coupled with some prin-
ciples to consider. What I intend in this brief document is to describe some
conditions where databases are useful to me in the construction and presen-
tation of my own narrative expression, specifically an interactive documentary
called
The Rise and Fall of
Black Velvet Flag. It is also important to reference
some of the history of the predecessors whose work I have found useful. But be-
fore I can continue and give a more specific account of my creative strategies, I
should define my use of some terms that I have repeated and will continue to
use throughout.
How a query result might create “narrative”
Some digital media theorists have resisted the legacy of the concept of nar-
rative, and celebrate a liberation from its imposing structures and systemiza-
tion of temporal and spatial representation for digital media. Specifically, I am
referring to Lev Manovich and his discussion of database culture and its re-
sistance to the implied orderings of classical notions of narrative (Manovich
1998: 80-82). However, my experience with databases differs. While looking at
a minimal list generated from a database query, there still remains from the
representation of an object by its ordered title a set of loosely unanchored signs
held in each field of a record. From these signs the perceiver may uncontrollably
detect a pattern, a story perhaps, as to the logic behind the structure of the list.
It is the structure and representation of the data that are the essential compo-
nents that allow a list to be a narrative. The degree to which the data structure
and query logic reveal themselves in the result returned is an indication of the
comprehensibility of database-derived narrative.
David Bordwell's exhaustive inquiry into classical Hollywood cinema pro-
vides some useful parallels. As he used Vladamir Propp's taxonomic study of
Russian folktales (Propp 1968) to understand the underlying functions of Hol-
lywood films (Bordwell 1986: 18), I believe that a similar application to the
database query is useful. Three important concepts are relevant in my def-
inition of narrative that I will use from Propp. Fabula describes a sequence
of events in a causal and/or chronological order that a perceiver can extrapo-
late from a text. Syuzhet describes the actual presentation of events in the text
(some would call this the plot). Also there is narration - a cue to the perceiver to
