DATABASE NARRATIVES
As you’ll remember from the Rose reading last week, under the influence of the internet “a new type of narrative is emerging – one that’s told through many media at once in a way that’s nonlinear, that’s participatory and often gamelike, and that’s designed above all to be immersive” (2011, p. 3).
As you work towards pitching your own ‘new direction in narrative’, we offer another nonlinear narrative theory, that of the database narrative.
In his discussion of the principle of variability, Lev Manovich suggests a form of nonlinear narrative, which he calls a database narrative. In this model a narrative is fragmented into self-contained records and stored in a database. These self-contained records are called chunks, narremes or modules and could be text passages, individual images, or video clips. In theory, the database contains a collection of items or story fragments that the user can put back together in different orders and combinations to generate a wide variety of narratives.
According to Manovich’s theory, the variability of a database narrative is only possible because of its modularity. In other words, because the narrative modules are not hard-wired together they can be arranged into many different sequences. It is the user, in collaboration with the automated software, who performs this arrangement of narrative modules into a variety of sequences. To describe how the variability of a database narrative works, Manovich offers the following analogy of a film editor who creates a narrative from a database of film footage. Usually the editor is working under the instruction of the film’s director, so both are responsible for the narrative of the film. Manovich writes, “During editing the editor constructs a film narrative out of this database, creating a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films which could have been constructed” (2001, p. 208). Similarly, the user of a database narrative constructs a sequence from its database of narrative modules. In doing so, the user performs one of the tasks traditionally performed by the storyteller, namely, re-ordering narrative elements into a sequence.
Whilst Manovich calls some films ‘database cinema’ – most notably Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) – he defines the database narrative as a purely digital phenomenon. For other theorists, however, database narrative can also be found in literature and cinema (Kinder 2002; Kinder 2003; Bizzocchi 2005). The new media theorist, Marsha Kinder, defines database narrative as “narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories” (2003, p. 6). She sees such narratives “throughout the entire history of cinema, from the early cinema of attractions to the present” (2003, p. 4). Some of the films she terms database narratives are Groundhog Day (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), Memento (2000), and Run Lola Run (1998). To this list the media theorist Jim Bizzocchi adds Rashomon (1950), Timecode (2000), and the BBC adaptation of The Norman Conquests (1977).
The defining feature of these narratives is that they challenge the traditional mode of chronological ordering. Each of these narratives is ordered, to some extent, by point-of-view, spatial location, reverse chronology, or chronological looping.
For Manovich, the principle of variability is strongly related to the concept of customisation. He writes that the logic of new media corresponds to the logic of post-industrial society where “every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and “select” her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices” (2001, p. 60). For instance, Manovich writes that the user of a hypertext can produce her own version of the work “by selecting a particular path through it” (2001, p. 61). For Manovich the variable work is an improvement on the one-size fits all model of traditional media. He writes, “new media technology acts as the most perfect realisation of the utopia of an ideal society composed from unique individuals” (2001, p. 61). The user doesn’t receive a ‘one-size fits all’ narrative. Instead, she is able to construct her own unique narrative and thus, she is re-assured that she, too, is unique.
Can a narrative that has been customised on the fly ever really be a genuine improvement over a narrative that has been skilfully crafted over months or years? Perhaps the real strength of a database narrative is that it allows the user can generate many unique sequences, which combine to form a very different experience of a narrative.
Rhizome narratives
In botany, a rhizome is a root or underground stem that sends out shoots from its nodes. No two rhizomes are ever identical. The philosophers Deleuze and Guattari use the term rhizome to describe a web-like, non-linear, decentralised structure that can be entered or exited at multiple points. A narrative with a rhizome structure may have a defined beginning and ending, as in this diagram, but in its centre each node may be linked to any other node.
Here are some examples of rhizome narratives.
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| Content: The story of the great lakes in Canada. Text info, voice over, haunting music. Buttons animate. Links to external websites. | Content: stories about individuals living in highrises all over the world | Content: documents an Inupiat whale hunt in Barrow, Alaska. |
| Interface: Choose one of the 24 topics on the left side of the screen. Clicking one of the tiny images will also take you to one of these 24 topics. | Interface: click on different ‘rooms’ via world map or via face menu. Once in a room, scroll around and click different graphics to view movies. | Interface: interactive timeline, mosaic or pinwheel interface. |
The challenge of this structure is to create a narrative interface that allows the user to access the rhizome structure in a systematic manner. As Marie-Laure Ryan, a digital media theorist, explains, an author can reconcile database and narrative by creating “a database design and a linking philosophy sufficiently transparent to enable the readers to aim with precision at the elements of the story that they want to expand” (2006). For Ryan, if the content of a database narrative and its interface are constructed appropriately, “the unpredictable probes and always incomplete exploration of the reader will not prevent the emergence of narrative meaning” (2006, p.149).
In The Whale Hunt users can isolate different thematic or spatial groups of images using the metadata that Harris has assigned to each image. According to Manovich, “Metadata is what allows computers to ‘see’ and retrieve data, move it from place to place, compress it and expand it, connect data with other data, and so on” (2002, p. 1). The user utilises the metadata of the work by clicking on the ‘change constraints’ button and opening the constraints panel (figure 8). This panel allows the user to find particular image groupings within the thousands of images contained in the work. The constraints are organised into four categories: ‘cast’, ‘concept’, ‘context’ and ‘cadence’. Clicking on these constraints will progressively narrow the number of images available on the main screen.
The constraints work by filtering photos according to their metadata. For instance, if the user chooses ‘Joe’ from the ‘Cast’ constraints, only the images with the metadata tag ‘Joe’ will be available on the main screen. If, in addition, the user chooses the concept ‘food’, only the images with the metadata tags ‘Joe’ and ‘food’ will be available. As the user selects each constraint, the photos without that tag disappear from the main screen. The constraints can be progressively chosen until the number of available photos decreases to zero.
YOUR TASKS
Flipped lecture: come to the tutorial with an example of a narrative that ‘challenge the traditional mode of chronological ordering’. If you can show us something on screen, even better!
Pitch preparation: come to the tutorial with a draft of your ‘logline’, or short 1-3 sentence summary of your digital narrative, for me and your peers to workshop with you.
If you haven’t already emailed through your BLOG URL, it’s very important you do so ASAP.
References:
Bizzocchi, J. (2005) “Run, Lola, Run: film as narrative database” (university paper, draft available here).
Kinder, M. (2003) “Designing a Database Cinema,” in J. Shaw & P. Weibels (eds.) Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film (pp. 346-353) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 348-49.
Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Rose, F. (2011) The Art of Immersion: how the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way we tell stories, W. W. Norton and Company, New York and London
Ryan, M-L. (2006) Avatars of Story, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press