<!--StartFragment-->
This is in response to the above comment and Edward's comment on the previous paragraph:
Thank you for pushing on this idea—I recognize that it was never fully developed in the essay, and it may be helpful if I take the opportunity to work on it a little bit more here. I didn’t mean to state that narrative and orderings of information are synonymous. (In the sentence that you point to I probably should have used the word “and” instead of “or.”) Rather, I was pursuing the thought that an ordering of information might be conceived as the embryo of narrative, with potential for development, and that the point at which one becomes the other can be a fuzzy boundary. The OED defines a narrative as “an account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with the establishing of connections between them.” I suppose an “ordering of information,” of the type one would pull from a database, is a set of facts that have some order but often lack explicit linear connections. I would argue, however, that the way a user grabs information through a database moves towards the formation of connections: because she must access her data via defined avenues (think specific search terms, menus, etc.,) rather than dipping into a raw pool of unsorted data, any information that she views contains threads of connection pre-formed by metadata. I would not argue that this constitutes a fully formed narrative, but I would like to trouble the notion that database and narrative are fundamentally opposed.
<!--EndFragment-->