From tradition to emerging practice: A hybrid computational production model for Interactive Documentary

Abstract

This paper introduces Interactive Documentary as a new production paradigm. Research objectives are (1) to engage documentary practice with emerging media technologies in an open data space; (2) to prototype tools to facilitate cyclical authoring among a contributors’ community. Interactive Documentary is here defined as a media production model with interactive author functions for constructing a narrative voice as a document of reality itself. The proposed system is envisioned for applications beyond motion picture genres, supporting the creation of living documents used in educational and collaborative project settings. Three types of users are anticipated: Authors, Contributors, and Observers. A formalization of traditional documentary production provides workflow analysis and modeling. The process of authoring is discussed in detail as well as system requirements and design specifications. A computational architecture hosts an author function; documentary authoring is implemented as query-display-edit facilitated by an inference engine. The system supports real-time enactive query across heterogeneous media resources, parallel media signal processing, and multi screen presentation and display formats. A use case takes upon a regional architectural history as an example of data design with domain sensitive ontology engineering. Ontology supports heterogeneous cross-referential capacity; its structure is reflected in a GUI designed to facilitate concept-based navigation across 2D graphics, 3D models, video, and audio resources. A dual-root-node data design links ontological reasoning with metadata, which provides a method for defining hybrid semantic–quantitative relationships.