The story is fantastic. I'm forwarding it to a friend who just had an intense doomed love affair in Buenos Aires. Something about that city!

I think that Manovich gives a lot of elasticity to the term "narrative," perhaps too much... it doesn't always end up meaning "story," more sort of "linear chain of events." I'm still kind of enamored of the idea that, instead of database and narrative (both of which terms depend on existing media), we should talk about the spatial and temporal forms of new media. The "database" version of your story is thus spatial -- we can see all the events laid out in a grid, without a path -- and the "narrative" version is temporal -- we see it in order. Even if we were able to choose entirely what order to pieces were viewed in without having to go back to the main database, the path would still be temporal because it would comprise the order in which we viewed the elements. Of course, the "database" that Manovich refers to isn't always strictly spatial -- I mean, it's often only an implied database, and is never viewed even in virtual space. So I guess what I'm saying is that database is a new media object figured in three dimensions, and narrative is the same object figured in four.

Manovich's articulation of the competition between narrative imagination and a database imagination is a neat way of encapsulating a lot of the anxieties that come with "digital studies." We come to Susquehanna hall because we're narrative people; database people spend their time curing cancer and whatnot. (That's obviously a simplificiation and a generalization, and Joseph points to some ways in which the two terms are really much more fluid in their relationship; but bear with me.)

For my part, I'm fascinated by what might be called a database _aesthetic_. Not data but our _representations_ of data ("lines of light, like city lights receding"). You see this on the Atlas of Cyberspace site--if you think these images are "cool" that's more than just an incidental response. Clusters and constellations of data, Borgesian labyrinths of encylopedic lore forming and reforming in the reticulations of the network (i.e., Google's inexorable pages of ranked hits, line after line of effortlessly articulated paratextual commentary), virtual worlds without end . . . this isn't just about "access" to "information" (there's that transcendental signifier again)--it's about a representational shift, lodged in the tuples and arrays marking postmodern computer science that's arguably as fundamental as the advent of linear perspective in the Renaissance.

We're already beginning to see the beginnings of database _art_ (check out www.potatoland.org for example); how might we begin to talk about a database aesthetic?

{Very nice, Joe. Jess and I spent a bit talking about the site at coffee house the other night. I'm wondering if the site can be set up to further highlight the database/narrative tension. Thanks for sharing. Poignant.}

As I read this piece I was thinking of Maonovich's claim that "although interactive interfaces make explicit paradigmatic sets, they are still organized along the syntagmatic dimension" (232). After viewing the database version of Joseph's piece, I have to question if that's true. Suppose you were to just view the set of pictures without the accompanying text. The pictures could be arrranged in a number of different ways, according to a number of different criteria, like the size or color of the objects contained within the picture or the presence of a certain person within the picture. Creating a narrative may not be the intent at all, yet each different arrangement would indeed result in a narrative of some sort. In this case, the syntagmatic organization is the result of the database output, not the cause of it. Or maybe the syntagm and the paeradigm are one and the same.