In 1928, Milnam Parry radically restructured western critical understanding of how Homeric poetry is composed. Parry's proposed that oral poetry was a process of following metrical structures and drawing on a large repository of epithets or formulaic phrases to fill in the blanks. Instead of inspiration and memorization of words, oral poets follow metre, and then utilize an archive of phrases. (Drawn from Ong, Orality and Literacy, p.17-21)
In 2001, Lev Manovich, developed theories about database logic, repeatedly stressing how the ability to access lists of data and link to other data "contribute to the anti-narrative logic"(Language of New Media, p.221).
Comparing these two theories it is possible to see how oral composition is interpretable as database narrative: the archive of epithets and formulaic phrases are retrieved from the cultural database and used to fill slots according to metrical criteria. Perhaps this compositional method offers a viable model for anticipating how larger scale narratives will emerge from databases in spite of the bias against narrative that Manovich has chronicled.
As an empirical case-study, I offer the methodology I used for creating Interstitial: mp3 titles became phrases which sorted into chapters were stored in an archive (although formally a database structure, they conceptually are comprehensible as a database). Phrases from the correct archive were retrieved stochastically; proto-narrative emerged at the confluence of database and choice.
Labels: database, narrative, orality
