Documentary Practices Research Articles

Documentary Practice as Praxis: A Direct Appeal to the Realization of the Social Act

The essential preoccupation of this paper is documentary practice as (social) praxis, the voice of the photography аs a direct mode of transmission and not only the discovery or mediation of reality. Alan Sekula's photographic discourse is taken as a case study, a practice that directly engages the subject – the position of the worker within the working class, critically representing the reality that is usually masked by spectacle. The hypotheses assume that the methodology of contextualization and discursivization of documentary photography (Untitled Slide Sequence, 1972) leads to a conscious perception of a historical and social reality. Using a cross-methodology of the author's theory and practice, referring to the author's critical point of view, Marxist and post-Marxist theories, this paper indicates that Sekula develops a specific photo-graphology concerned with the directness of expression, the literalness of meaning, and the unmasking of iconic signs captured by capitalist signifiers. The arguments underline that the use of documentary photography as a direct appeal can encourage the realization of a social act. The conclusion implies that the use of the author's voice in the direction of changing the movement of aesthetic production and reception leads to actualization, towards awakening of the passive component – confrontation with social stratification under capitalist order.

Interaktywny dokument i wizualizacja danych w dwóch ujęciach

The contemporary convergence of documentary practices and data visualization sets an interesting field for both creative and conceptual exploration. At the same time, however, at both levels we are still dealing with a challenge, a broad spectrum of possibilities still waiting to be filled with the full range of solutions. The aim of this text is to look at the phenomenon of interactive documents based on data visualization from two key perspectives. The first one is focused on the issue of the status of data and their visual representations in the context of Big Data as a set of culturally, socially, politically and business shaped database technologies, data analysis schemes and numerous ideologies that accompany these activities. There is also an interesting cognitive perspective of how data were and are conceptualized, produced and used both in the tradition of documentary film and in the domain of applied data visualizations. The second approach problematizes the tension between the sublime and the anti-sublime, as two opposing (although very often complementary in individual implementations) epistemic attitudes, which in data visualization research have been used as a tool for typologizing practices, but also as concepts capturing the transgressive value of visual representations of large scale data repositories.

Documenting Territorialidad: an intercultural approach to the provenance of Mapuche land records

Using critical place research and documentary methods, this article examines the Mapuche territorial cause in Chile and exposes the deficiencies of state-produced Mapuche land titles, known as Títulos de Merced, which are required for and (mis)used as evidence by Chile’s Indigenous land restitution program. The Títulos de Merced were granted to Mapuche families during and after the military occupation of Wallmapu (Mapuche territory), as documentation of their relocation to reducciones (reservations) between 1884 and 1929. However, these approximately 3000 titles do not fully represent Mapuche land claims. Instead, they were used by the newly formed Chilean state to reduce Mapuche territory to approximately 5% of its ancestral span, leaving undocumented much of the territories that communities were effectively using before the reduction process––what Mapuche claimants refer to as tierras antiguas or ancestral lands. Despite this, CONADI, the government agency that administers the land program, defines these titles as the primary sources of documentary evidence to prove Mapuche land dispossession. Therefore, not only are the Títulos de Merced not enough, but they negatively impact Mapuche land claims by purposefully reducing, once again, Mapuche ancestral territory, this time discursively. Mapuche claimants are paradoxically forced to validate claims to their ancestral land through documents that were designed to legitimize their dispossession. By examining the insufficiency and inappropriateness of the Títulos de Merced as evidence for Mapuche territorial claims, this paper proposes the intercultural practice of documenting territorialidad—the expression of cultural, economic, and spiritual Mapuche practices over the territory—in addition to colonial demarcations of land, as a form of producing/using evidence for Mapuche land restitution claims. Suggesting the mapu (land/territory) as provenance and territorialidad as evidence, this alternative documentary practice unsettles the Títulos de Merced as the only legitimate form of evidence for Mapuche land claims and theorizes interculturalidad—the recognition of and dialogue between diverse ways of knowing coexisting within the same territory—as a framework for thinking about provenance when working with Indigenous land records.

Matters of Distance: On Consent, Documentary Practices, and the Nevada Desert

Matters of Distance: On Consent, Documentary Practices, and the Nevada Desert

Planning scientific documentary production for social impact, a practice-based approach

ABSTRACT This practice-based research explores the ways in which science is communicated through documentary practice, drawing an overview of creative strategies, narrative styles and modes of spectatorship that potentially increase the social impact of scientific documentaries. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the aim is to delineate effective ways of communicating scientific knowledge through documentary for broadcast television, increasing audience engagement while promoting awareness of sociocultural and biodiversity issues, specifically in the region of San Carlos, Tamaulipas in Mexico. This research proposes a model for production planning based on the Balance Value Impact Model (BVI) by Tanner, Simon [2020. Delivering Impact With Digital Resources: Planning Your Strategy in the Attention Economy. Facet Publishing]. This research is part of an interdisciplinary project titled Valuation and Resignification of the Cultural and Biocultural Heritage of the Mezcal Region of the Sierra de San Carlos, Tamaulipas, a national project encompassing the work of 29 scientists affiliated to the Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas in Mexico.

Staging the Theatrical Public Sphere in The Laramie Project

Abstract Contemporary documentary theater has become a favored genre in scholarship to investigate the relationship between theater and the public sphere (Reinelt, “Promise”; Balme; Claycomb, Lurch). Drawing on Christopher B. Balme’s concept of the theatrical public sphere and other scholarship, I examine how The Laramie Project (2000) by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project stages the idea of the public sphere and, in the process, rethinks the form of documentary performance. On one level, the play reflects a discursive turn in documentary practice as multiple narrative layers dramatize the collision of opposing value systems and civic voices in order to challenge established boundaries between the private and the public, the liberal and the conservative, the rural and the urban, poverty and wealth, life and art. The theatrical sphere is constructed as an imaginary space not just of rational debate but of negotiating questions of accountability by appealing to the affective engagement of the audience. On another level, I argue, the play operates as a metatheatrical piece, using strategies such as a narrator and anti-illusionism to establish the theatrical public sphere as a conceptual framework that fuses sociopolitical engagement with a self-reflexive theater practice.

Fotografias como arquivos e objetos de mediação cultural

The aim is to understand constituent elements of photographs as archival documents of secondary value, based on the analysis of documentary and cultural practices that focus on the production of the archival fond within the scope of the extension program 'Entre Comunidades’ . The methodological procedures adopted correspond to bibliographical, documentary and archival research to meet the objective. It is evident that archival values are constituent elements of photographs as archival documents of secondary value, associating them with documentary practices, memory activation and cultural mediation. It was concluded that photography has cultural values, notably aesthetic or formal value, being the object of cultural mediation.

Not Your Model Minority

This roundtable offers a conversational case study of how a film retrospective on Asian American documentary filmmaker, producer, and activist Renee Tajima-Peña turned into a series of community care and coalition-building events, co-curated by precariously employed faculty at San José State University, California. The curators behind Not Your Model Minority: The Art and Activism of Renee Tajima-Peña had envisioned the retrospective as a way of showcasing Tajima-Pena’s hidden legacy, particularly the way in which her archival work in documentary practice connects the struggles of Asian Americans with African Americans and Latinx communities, essentially curating solidarity among aggrieved communities. Moved by the turn of events brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and the spike in anti-Asian violence unleashed by it, the curators remade the film retrospective into a deeply needed time-space for feminist-oriented communal sharing and caring, fostering acts of intersectional intimacy and promiscuous care.

The development of self-therapeutic documentary films in China

This article is devoted to the study of the development of self-therapeutic documentaries in China since 2000. The object of the study is a Chinese documentary about self-therapy. The subject of the research are documentaries about self-therapy in the early 2000s: "More than One is unhappy" (2000), "Home Videotape" (2001), "Nightingale is not the only Voice" (2001), as well as films that appeared after 2016: "Small Talk" (2016), "Minding the Gap" (2017) and "The Lovely Widow and Her Annoying Son" (2019). Special attention is paid to self-therapeutic documentaries presented at the Mother Film Festival and the documentary masterclass FamilyLens, created in China in 2022. The author examines in detail such aspects of the topic as the causes of its occurrence, the definition of the genre and the form of the film text. To understand the trajectory of development of Chinese documentaries about self-therapy, as well as the causes and characteristics of each period, this study uses an integrated approach using content analysis and text analysis, as well as psychoanalytic theory to explain the filming of documentaries about self-therapy. The author argues that the key point in the foundation of the subgenre of documentaries about self-therapy in China is the presence of the director as the main character of the film, filming himself. The study identifies two distinct periods in the development of self-therapeutic documentary films in China, both of which are closely related to the development of film equipment. In conclusion, the author not only evaluates the positive attitude of self-therapeutic documentary practice towards self-awareness and raising public awareness of problems related to the native family, but also argues that researchers should pay more attention to potential ethical problems present in films. This is because, in fact, directors do not heal during filming, but use it as a means of attacking their parents.

Remediated memory, digital witnessing and engagement: A qualitative analysis of the interactive documentary ‘The Space We Hold’

This paper sets out to study how creative documentary practices deconstruct traumatic memory, and then digitalise witnessing and engagement afforded by digital technology in the award-winning online interactive documentary The Space We Hold. Premised on culture memory studies and documentary studies, the social function of the documentary in reshaping narratives and forging public engagement has been discussed in this research. Interactive documentary becomes the unique visual artistic medium that allows the wider public to bear witness and emotionally experience the meaning of a traumatic past. This interactive project is reviewed as one site of memory to answer the main research question: ‘How does hypermediacy in an interactive documentary enable this non-linear storytelling structure to reframe the narrative and identity of a community that struggles for social justice?’. Along with presenting direct provocation through the innovative hypernarrative, this interactive documentary focuses on victims’ current lives, familial feelings and their contribution in pursuit of justice, showing depth in reflection and density in life. By exploring how The Space We Hold acts as a bear and agent to enhance audience engagement, I contend that the documentary is restyled as a space that allows individual memory to intertwine with collective memory through the combination of authorial expressivity and interactive participatory. In this pragmatic and reflexive approach to bear traumatic witness, we sense the constant battle between stigmatised communities and their reinterpreting narratives.

Working inside/out films division: the discursive documentary practices of Joshy Joseph

ABSTRACT Films Division stands as one of the pioneering institutions in post-independent India that played a crucial role in shaping and envisioning the country's identity as a post-colonial nation. Established in 1948, it is the largest repository of moving images in India. Despite being a state-regulated institution responsible for overseeing the production and distribution of newsreels and documentary films to support the objectives of nation building, integration, and development, there is a school of filmmakers inside Films Division who made films beyond the perceived boundaries of the institution. Identified as the 'transient outliers', these filmmakers have created experimental films within Films Division that challenged the collective and homogeneous vision of Films Division films. Joshy Joseph is one among the transgressive voices within the institution who has created innovative and experimental cinematic works despite operating within the confines of state censorship. In the context of the recent decision by the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to merge Films Division with the National Film Development Corporation, this interview with Joseph explores his life and politics as a filmmaker in Films Division. The interview also delves into Joseph's creative contributions, including innovative editing, incorporation of found footage, and utilization of still images, which emphasize his unique cinematic style.

Recursive Documentary Design and an Awareness of the Mechanism

This essay documents 3D-printed sculptures displayed at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Document Academy. To raise awareness about the cultural significance of the mechanisms that produce digital substance, the sculptures lend material heft to some of the abstractions that help to constitute textual representations of a sixteenth-century Korean lyric and modern Korean poems from the early twentieth century in digital environments. The essay also describes previous exhibitions of the sculptures that utilized augmented reality technologies. By documenting the ways augmented reality technologies represented 3D-printed sculpture that documents digital texts that represent printed documents and manuscripts, the essay suggests how recursive documentary practices can be designed to enable cultural memory while acknowledging the inevitable losses associated with cultural reproduction.

Deepfakes in documentary film production: images of deception in the representation of the real

ABSTRACT Deepfakes are a technological innovation that might be understood to violate the documentary film’s relationship with the real. Yet documentary makers have been among the first screen producers to adopt this technology, using it to swap the faces or voices of people they present to their audiences, further disrupting the already complex relationship between the filmmaker and their subject. This paper investigates the growing practice of documentary deepfakes, using two case studies of documentary films from the period 2019–2022 that have used varied forms of deepfakery, examining the intentions of the filmmakers, the technical processes and the ways in which creative choice is both expanded and limited by the technology. An interview-based research methodology provides original insights into filmmakers’ rationales when creating deepfakes. The paper reveals the contradictions inherent in deepfake practice, as described by one documentary filmmaker: ‘I'm looking at deepfake as a way of telling the truth’ (Benjamin Field, producer). A central theme is the ethics of documentary practice using manipulative AI. This paper contributes new insights to theoretical discourse around the digital manipulation of the moving image, discussing the growing disruption caused by deepfakes to documentary film culture and audiences.

Документация для оценки школьной системы и профессионального развития учителей: Совместное исследование университета и школы в Италии

The continuous professional development of the teacher (CDP) has long been considered a prerequisite for the career and also for economic progress. CDP must be compared to standards which also make it possible to construct validation systems for the teachers’ skills in progress. The issue of teaching professionalism emerges also in the Italian legislative debate. We outline the research “The continuous professional development of the teacher: from the Improvement Plan to the appraisal”, conducted with a group of 33 schools in Southern Italy, the University of Bari and Unione Cattolica Italiana Insegnanti Medi (UCIIM, teachers’ association). The research project investigated the documentation of practices (connected with school’s self-evaluation, teacher evaluation and appraisal procedures) to improve the quality of teaching and to develop teacher professionalism. Three phases of research training occurred: a) The first phase involved a specific document analysis of “Rav” and “PdM” (acronyms for Self-Assessment Report - Rapporto di Auto-Valutazione - and Improvement Plan – Piano di Miglioramento). These documents were presented to the teaching staff and served as the primary materials for self-evaluation and decision-making. b) In the second phase, referred to as "professional development," the skills audit and standards were introduced and collaboratively developed with the teachers. These documents formed the foundation of a teacher's professional development program. c) The third phase was dedicated to "merit appraisal." It focused on selecting and analyzing the best appraisal sheets, which were considered the primary documents for assessing merit and promoting teachers. The school staff involved over 300 people, including teachers and principals. The results of the study underlined: the impact of the documentary practices introduced by school evaluation system on professional development; the importance of university-school collaboration supporting school-based assessment and teachers' professional development, shifting from a top-down orientation to more teacher self-regulating initiatives; the methodological-educational choice of principals as teachers’ tutors.

Persistence of Practice in Law's Parwana and Palm Leaf Empire

AbstractThe essays in this forum demonstrate how attending to the intricacies of documentary practice provides a way to see legal practices over the long haul. Different materials—for instance, paper and palm leaves—manifested different ways of understanding and doing law. But change from one way of doing law to another is sticky; old practices persist alongside new ones. Appreciating this helps us see past apparent ruptures in ways of living brought about by states and empires as they come and go. By looking closely at the routines and physical materials through which law works, we can look past simple binaries: European vs. indigenous; pre-colonial vs. colonial; resistance vs. accommodation; oral vs. literate; manuscript vs. print; paper vs. palm leaf.

Archiving the Swiss Tagsatzung in the early modern era: from distributed protocols to confederal archive

ABSTRACTThe evolution of the Swiss Confederation from a local alliance among Imperial estates to a national entity on the European stage can be mapped by tracking the way that federal business was archived from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. The original Diet (Tagsatzung) established after the allied cantons gained shared territories in the Aargau in the 1420s lacked the personnel or institutional identity necessary to undertake any archival activity. As the Confederation gained institutional definition and became a regional player in the politics of the Holy Roman Empire and of Central Europe, however, documentary practices became increasingly routinized, and stable federal collections began forming in parallel in the archives of the leading cantons. Consisting of durable representations of ongoing debates and negotiations and preserved in documents (Abschiede) that were circulated differentially depending on the matters and parties involved, the emerging confederal archive was distributed in that no single location possessed a complete version, and imaginary in that contemporaries regarded it as a comprehensive unity despite its very real physical and material fragmentation. In the later sixteenth century, a separate archival collection reflecting the Confederation’s shared business emerged in the administrative centre of Baden (Aargau), reflecting the consolidating identity of Confederation as it moved out of the Empire’s orbit. Repeated efforts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to complete and protect this collection referred to it as an archive despite its unusual characteristics. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, projects to create a Swiss national archive, either virtually or in print, culminated in the printed Eidgenössische Abschiede that created a documentary record of a Swiss state since the thirteenth century that had never existed historically.

A Defiant Act of Looking: Prisoners’ Illicit Documentary Practices of Shooting-Back

During an armed security operation on Lebanon’s most notorious prison, an image emerges from the POV of a prisoner. Capturing the military vehicles and the prison bars obstructing his vision, a prisoner snatches a photograph through his illicitly smuggled cellphone camera. In this article, I follow the events of Lebanese authorities’ intervention on Roumieh Central Prison’s Bloc B and collect a sample of images and videos produced and circulated by prisoners as the operation was taking place. By examining the frame, composition, POV, sound, and montage of such amateur fragmentary cellphone recordings, I note two major modes of framing adopted by prisoners; one frames outside the bars and the second frames inside. I contextualize such modes of framing as ‘counter-shots’ in relation to the state’s media strategies of legitimizing its repressive actions and I argue that prisoners utilize smuggled media technologies, such as the cellphone and its camera, as a response to the state’s performative acts of sovereignty. Prisoners operationalize the frame and the POV to create a ‘counter’ way of seeing and documenting the events on Bloc B. Hence, prison cellphone recordings reflect not only what is portrayed inside their frames, but also their means of production. Through the framework of media as practice and the notion of media witnessing, I argue that the illicitly produced modes of framing reflect a practice of media production based around the smuggling of media technologies into the prison. Through such a practice, prisoners produce images and videos to represent and document their lived experiences, relay testimonies, and make the audience bear witness to the horrific and precarious conditions of incarceration; hence, engaging in a practice of documentation from the prison.

Converting the Land: Property, Legal Knowledge, and Documentary Practices in Toledo and the Ebro Valley, 1085–c. 1200 CE

Abstract This article examines the drafting of land contracts and the evolution of local property law in key regional centers of power during the transition from Islamic to Christian rule in eleventh- and twelfth-century Iberia. Through the analysis of a range of Arabic and Latin property land sales preserved in the ecclesiastical archives of Toledo and the Ebro valley, the following study looks for signs of potential legal and documentary diffusion taking place as a result of the Christian conquests of the Middle and Upper Marches of al-Andalus. The paper explores the relationship between property and its transfer, on the one hand, and the emerging post-conquest documentary cultures, on the other. It studies borrowings between Latin and Arabic land documents, some of which can be associated with Andalusī property and contract law. The article links this transfer of knowledge to the legal and economic interests of the religious institutions that preserved the Arabic documents, highlighting how new dioceses and monasteries reclaimed the rights and benefits associated with former mosques. Such findings are framed as part of the active preservation and engagement of local property knowledge and Islamicate documentary practices, and their recycling for the post-conquest management and reorganization of the land.

Materialidad de la información en Bernd Frohmann

Bernd Frohmann's investigations have been relevant to the field of information science and related disciplines, addressing topics such as enunciation/discourse, institutionality, dispositives, networks, agency, documentary practices, actors, associations, policies, information regimes, and materiality. These themes are shaped, in terms of materiality, through the stabilization of statements in documents or "quasi-objects" that circulate and generate social effects. Therefore, the objective is to analyze the concept of materiality in Frohmann, considering institutional, epistemological, and political implications. Literature review was conducted, including Frohmann's publications from 1992 to 2008, as well as analysis of texts that utilize that theoretical framework. The analysis is based on the assumptions of documentary ontology, whereby documentation is guided by the interplay of document properties, motivations, and agency effects. Within these assumptions, materiality serves as a heuristic resource. The publications offer a distinct overview of documentation studies, differentiating from positivist, functionalist, and/or mentalist approaches. When addressing the materiality of information, Frohmann is primarily interested in the processes it undergoes, such as how the document, as a sociotechnical object and means of materiality stabilization, generates effects in specific contexts with social, epistemological, political, and ethical implications.

The politics of video intimacy: Julie Gustafson’s feminist documentary practice

ABSTRACT This article historicizes and theorizes the feminist documentary practice of Julie Gustafson, focusing on The Politics of Intimacy: Ten Women Talk About Orgasm and Sexuality (US, 1973) and Desire (US, 2005). Employing archival research and original interviews with Gustafson, it argues that both works interrogate intimacy’s use value for navigating new modes of documentary witnessing afforded by video. It begins by contextualizing The Politics of Intimacy’s modes of ‘intimate witnessing’ in relation to 1970s guerrilla TV movements, feminist documentary filmmaking, and women’s video art, as well as in terms of Gustafson’s involvement in the Manhattan-based Global Village Video Resource Center. It then analyzes how The Politics of Intimacy utilizes a ‘voice-centered’ feminist documentary method, which foregrounds video’s intimate appeals and polyvocal modes of address to create a multilayered account of women’s sexual experiences. Finally, the article contends that The Politics of Intimacy’s voice-centered approach crucially informs the interplay of generational voices in Desire, which documents Gustafson’s long-term collaboration with the Teenage Girls’ Documentary Project. Gustafson’s documentary practice takes on added complexity in Desire, as it maps emergent solidarities across generations of women video makers to reveal feminist voicing to be a complex, at-times contradictory expression of the self-in-relation.