Similarly, readings of narratives in the DALN need not dwell on, but cannot completely ignore, the fact that each narrative constitutes part of a multifaceted item in a database managed as a cultural archive, each item containing associated metadata and, perhaps, other content files. These key terms—narrative, database, and archive—recently figured in a forum in "The Changing Profession" section of PMLA focused on the transformation of the idea and ideals of physical archives as their cultural work is increasingly effected through online databases. The forum speaks indirectly but powerfully to the challenge of reading the DALN as a database.
Drawing upon his long experience as co-editor of The Walt Whitman Archive, Ed Folsom, in a lead article entitled "Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives," observes that traditional notions of genre are too rigid—or have been deployed too rigidly—to do justice to the "rhizomorphous" nature of much of our cultural heritage, Whitman in particular. Folsom argues that the database resists the rigidity of traditional notions of genre; he focuses on the tension between the emergent genre of the database and two traditional cultural forms, narrative and archive. Much of his argument concerning narrative and database hinges on his reading of Lev Manovich's discussion of the terms in The Language of New Media, particularly Manovich's claim that narrative and database constitute "natural enemies":
As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. (225)
Folsom's—and Manovich's—discussion of the relationship between database and narrative is more nuanced than this claim about order, but even the issue of order demonstrates how messy such distinctions can get. While a "cause-and-effect trajectory" may lurk in the background of any narrative, narrative form often complicates or calls into question chronological or teleological order. And while databases always offer the possibility of reordering their records, any given representation of a database must present its contents in some order. As Folsom's acknowledges, order plays a key role in both narrative and database, but he sees the logic of the database transforming our expectations of narrative in "new media objects" (1574).
Folsom outlines a similar transformation of our notion of the archive:
Archive suggests physicality, idiosyncratic arrangement, partiality, while database suggests virtuality, endless ordering and reordering, and wholeness. Often we will hear archive and database conflated, as if the two terms signified the same imagined or idealized fullness of evidence. Archive and database do share the desire for completeness. . . . but the physicality of archive makes it essentially different from database. There will always be more physical information in an archive than in a database, just as there will always be more malleable and portable information in a database than in an archive. (1575-76)
Again, these distinctions are important—and messy. Idiosyncratically arranged archives can be (and have been) endlessly reordered, and the issue of wholeness and partiality seems to cut across both database and narrative. Several responses to Folsom's article tease out further complications.
Jerome McGann notes the similarities between narrative and a database's interface, through which we must necessarily interact with it:
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. (1588)
In short, the selection, collection, description, organization, and presentation of a database's contents necessarily involve narrative structures, including assumptions about how the information will be manipulated and used through the interface. And as noted above, narratives and other cultural artifacts are already, as McGann puts it, "multiply coded" (1589). McGann points to more subtle encodings, but even associating an author, date, and genre with a narrative explicitly marks it as encoded across three abstract categories entangled with notions of time and causation. Narrative and database, it seems, cannot easily be disentangled. This essay focuses on how we might read rather than resist or ignore those entanglements.
Indeed, N. Katherine Hayles's response to Folsom figures database and narrative as "natural symbionts," complementary but distinct cultural forms that, like organisms in a symbiotic relationship, exist in a "mutually beneficial relationship" (1603). On the one hand, Hayles argues that database requires narrative "as soon as meaning and interpretation are required" and, on the other, narrative must turn to database "in the computationally intensive culture of the new millennium to enhance its cultural authority and test the generality of its insights" (1603). In other words, when we imagine cultural texts as inevitably contained in a structure of "data," we see more easily how reading and interpreting those texts are inescapably complicated by "database" operations such as normalizing (imposing consistent description across items assumed to be alike), ordering (arranging texts according to culturally determined principles), and filtering (attending only to subsets of a larger collection), and we come to expect an account of the effects of such operations on any given interpretation.
Helpfully, Hayles and Manovich note that the distinction between narrative and database, between sequential and tabular ordering of information, seems analogous to the linguists' distinction between paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures. Here is Hayles's summary of the analogy:
Manovich touches on this contrast when he perceptively observes that for narrative, the syntagmatic order of linear unfolding is actually present on the page, while the paradigmatic possibilities of alternative word choices are only virtually present. For databases, the reverse is true: the paradigmatic possibilities are actually present in the columns and the rows, while the syntagmatic progress of choices concatenated into linear sequences by SQL commands is only virtually present. (1606)
We can generalize these observations for the DALN, a database of narratives. In the DALN, a search or browse yields a results list of alternative narratives, any one of which, or any subset of which, might substitute for the others as a place to begin examining the significance of a search term in the narratives collected in the DALN. And the order in which an interpretive argument considers any set of narratives is, in Manovich's terms, only virtually present in the DALN. Similarly, interpretive readings such as the exhibits in this collection present individual narratives or sets of narratives explicitly as evidence for interpretive claims. Implicitly (or virtually) present in those arguments are all the narratives that might substitute paradigmatically for any narrative in the exhibit, supporting, calling into question, or qualifying its interpretive claims. Of course, such possibilities for substitution exist for any evidence in any argument, but how we read and understand those possibilities must remain sensitive to the unique nature of any particular source of evidence—such as the DALN.
In what follows, we will consider several strategies for reading the relationships among narrative, database, and archive in the DALN, in each case providing digital tools in a DALN Database Toolkit aimed at helping users of the DALN explore the following aspects of the data in the DALN database: