Throughout my own reading of Lev Manovich’s “The Database,” my mind was continuously drawn to the argument surrounding “traditional” narrative elements and humanity’s own fascination of data compilation, storage, and retrieval. While it is true, in a way, that a database does not in fact tell any “story,” with no “beginning” or “end,” databases and data manipulation itself, does, in my opinion, exact a form similar to narration.

Visual.ly is a fast-growing database of visually-represented data through a format known as infographics. Designed and founded by less than a half-dozen individuals not even twelve months ago, Visual.ly has quickly become the largest data visualization compilation on the internet.

It is true that in a regular database format, such as a chart or graph, I may arbitrarily choose elements of a database or data collection that creates a “sequence” where they are not interconnected in any way by cause or effect. But when examining an infographic, I am led to follow the data visualization in one particular method. Some are not as strong an example of this as others, but the idea is that databases and data collection can, similarly to a story, be oriented in methods that attract the reader to traverse the data map in one particular way over another.

But is it a “story?” Is it a “narrative?” Are these ordered visualizations of data the same as examining data on a flat graph? It is hard to say, and I would hesitate to answer “yes” directly to any of these questions. But it is nevertheless important to examine the links between data and text, and how new media reshapes and revises modes of narrative expression.