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mined by keyword matches. The resulting experience for the viewer is unpre-
dictable, yet by carefully coding the video clips with attached alphanumeric
values, narration is maintained in its presentations of sequenced material.
The effect of the “Autonomist storyteller system” as a communicative work
indicates that the documentary is a potentially appropriate narrative genre
from which to contribute to this developing expressive form. Each document
can be catalogued and coded in a database for the service of multiple narra-
tives. If the database is programmed to organize its records to make narrative
construction possible, than a query to the database is, in a sense, a request for
it to tell a story. Or, a query more specifically is a temporal and spatial order-
ing of records sensitive to the logical systems created for the type of narrative
the author and the audience intend. Furthermore, the presentation interface is
an environment where the author and audience develop objectives for evolv-
ing a story. Or more specifically stated, multiple queries are given a context
where they can have value in relation to each other. Although I suggest here a
rudimentary use of a database system for an intelligent documentary narrative
engine, the iterated possibilities that I am using for the project based on the
content described below are more complicated.
The use of narrative intelligence to document youth-culture phenomena
The introduction of databases to the creative author does not eliminate the
viable use of linear moving images as an effective means of communica-
tion. Some subjects of inquiry, however, are exceptionally appropriate for ex-
ploration.
Youth culture provides two conditions that make it ideal terrain for
database documentary form. First, it has some stable elements that the host
adult culture imposes as youth labor to construct identity. Young people since
World War II have spent their leisure time and money exploring and creating
fashion, music, literature, cinema and drugs as symbols to differentiate them-
selves from adults. In contrast to the stable existence of these elements, their
content is dynamic. A progressive exploration through time reveals exceptional
qualitative variances of selection. Hence the second important condition is that
these elements contain variables that change - dynamic data. This dynamic
data is the collection of documents that a film or video maker uses to con-
struct the syuzhet, a logical or rhetorical structure that shapes the experience
of the viewer.
