Interactive Documentary Research Articles

O apelo educacional de narrativas interativas locativas desenvolvidas para tecnologias móveis

In this article I will present a discussion about interactive locative documentaries that demand the geographical displacement of the players to be experienced in their totality and the consequent use of mobile devices in their interaction. This study aims to analyze different formats within this sub-genre and discuss its educational importance. Keywords: locative narratives; interactivity; interactive documentaries; webdoc, immersive education.

Documentário interativo e estratégia de impacto social

The article explores issues surrounding the emergence of interactive documentaries for social purposes. It discusses how the interactive narratives of these documentaries are linked to the social functions and purposes of the project, espe- cially when integrated in broader communication strategies. The author follows the perspective of relational aesthetics and uses the notion of creative device as a way of reflecting on the issues pointed out. The article concludes with the discussion of the issues concerning the design and development of the interactive documentary Ilha Grande; cada playa, una isla; cada isla, una historia . Keywords: interactive documentary; webdocumentary; device.

Documental interactivo iberoamericano: proximidad y transformación social

This article deals with the interactive documentary produced in Ibero-America from an exploratory-descriptive study in the last five years. Interactivity goes beyond a selective and participatory contribution towards the impact and social transformation in an environment. Proximity, as a focus of the stories in the Ibero-American inter- active documentary, leads to experiences and initiatives that invite change and action, based on a strong social character. Keywords: interactive documentary; Ibero-America; proximity; transformation.

Interactive documentaries as a format in audiovisual media: A case study of RTVE and Al Jazeera

Anàlisi is a science journal published by the Journalism and Communication Sciences Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). The journal has been published by the UAB Journalism Department since 1980. Anàlisi publishes science articles in the fields of the communication sciences: journalism, advertising and public relations, audiovisual communication, internet, multimedia and similar areas, always from the social and cultural viewpoint and following the theoretical and methodological approaches of the media studies disciplines. Anàlisi will especially value articles from competitive research projects, with a clear articulation of theory and methodology, a well-defined and up-to-date theoretical framework, and proposed as a significant contribution to their subject area and field.

Remediations of Nonfiction: Animation, Interactivity, and Documentary From Africa

This article explores re-mediations of nonfiction through an examination of so-called animated documentary and interactive documentary. By focusing on case studies from Africa, the article proposes that while these processes and methods are not conventionally aligned with documentary practice in a customary sense, they offer aesthetic strategies that allow artists and filmmakers to consider their position reflexively as authors, curators, and participants in the narratives that they seek out to explore. Their films exist on the periphery of typical classifications of this genre, and this peripheral status allows them degrees of freedom that would otherwise not be possible with conventional methods. In animation, for example, they are able to draw on specific aesthetic motifs or culturally located iconography that resonates with local audiences. Through interactivity they are able to tap into the participatory cultures and user-generated content to encourage polyvocality as a means to examine “truth” and in turn to question the authority of the author.

Designing Journalists: Teaching Journalism Students to Think Like Web Designers

The authors introduced 80 university-level journalism students to a web design program called Klynt and supervised the creation of multiple interactive documentaries. They discovered that fledgling reporters could effectively design interactive media while creating work that reflects their own candid and extemporaneous ethos. Building on the insight that journalism in the digital age must give rise to modified best practices, this study examines the complex production processes from which multiple i-docs emerged. The authors conclude by suggesting four tentative “new best practices” for journalists attempting to think and act like web designers.

Curating the aural cultures of the Battery: Soundwalking, auditory tourism and interactive locative media sound art

Inside Outside Battery is a mobile media sound art installation for smartphone technologies that uses global positioning system (GPS) locative software to narrate walking visitors through the Battery, a heritage neighbourhood of St. John’s (Newfoundland, Canada). Auditory tourists, or soundwalkers, come to know the aural cultures of the Battery through the dynamic interactions of sound and place using site- and time-specific archival materials, stories, soundscapes, and expressive culture sourced from the Battery that play alongside real-time encounters with the physical and sonic materiality of the Battery. Employing practice-based ethnography, this article examines how site- and time-specific soundscape interactive documentary technologies engage socioenvironmental knowledge and foster a sense of place attachment for visitors to the Battery.

Telehealth in Schools Using a Systematic Educational Model Based on Fiction Screenplays, Interactive Documentaries, and Three-Dimensional Computer Graphics.

Preliminary studies suggest the need of a global vision in academic reform, leading to education re-invention. This would include problem-based education using transversal topics, developing of thinking skills, social interaction, and information-processing skills. We aimed to develop a new educational model in health with modular components to be broadcast and applied as a tele-education course. We developed a systematic model based on a "Skills and Goals Matrix" to adapt scientific contents on fictional screenplays, three-dimensional (3D) computer graphics of the human body, and interactive documentaries. We selected 13 topics based on youth vulnerabilities in Brazil to be disseminated through a television show with 15 episodes. We developed scientific content for each theme, naturally inserting it into screenplays, together with 3D sequences and interactive documentaries. The modular structure was then adapted to a distance-learning course. The television show was broadcast on national television for two consecutive years to an estimated audience of 30 million homes, and ever since on an Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) channel. It was also reorganized as a tele-education course for 2 years, reaching 1,180 subscriptions from all 27 Brazilian states, resulting in 240 graduates. Positive results indicate the feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness of a model of modular entertainment audio-visual productions using health and education integrated concepts. This structure also allowed the model to be interconnected with other sources and applied as tele-education course, educating, informing, and stimulating the behavior change. Future works should reinforce this joint structure of telehealth, communication, and education.

Review: i-docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary edited by Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose

Review: i-docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary edited by Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose

Interactive documentary and its limited opportunities to persuade

John Grierson’s classic definition of documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality” emphasizes both the genre’s indexical link to reality and the maker’s perspective on this reality. In recent times, a substantial number of so-called “interactive” documentaries has seen the light of day. In this paper, one dimension of such online documentaries, namely the freedom of users to access content via different paths of navigation as well as to skip material, is discussed from the perspective that a documentary, in a necessarily subjective way, attempts to convince the viewer of something. Interactivity limits the maker’s opportunities to do so.

Affective radicality: prisons, Palestine, and interactive documentary

ABSTRACTThis essay analyzes two recent interactive documentary projects: Sharon Daniel’s Public Secrets (2006), an exploration of the prison industrial complex through the testimonies of female inmates in California, and Zohar Kfir’s Points of View (2014) which “maps” Palestinian video advocacy projects made for and/or disseminated by B’Tselem, a human rights organization working in the occupied territories. I argue that the interactive documentary form, as deployed by Daniel and Kfir, draws on the legacies of radical documentary practice, but offers new possibilities for engagement and intervention. The interactive documentary form functions as a structuring device for a wealth of affectively powerful witnesses, testimonies, and varied forms of evidence. This essay explores how interactive documentaries allow viewers/users a multi-faceted affective encounter with a range of subjects and evidence. This form, in concert with a radical political stance, I argue, is a locus for the representation of and viewer/user critical engagement with broad systemic problems, renders visible hidden structures of violence and power, and engenders an “affective radicality” that moves viewers/users into larger networks of political discourse, militant activism, and practices of resistance.

Matters of concern and interactive documentary: notes for a computational nonfiction

ABSTRACTThis essay applies actor–network theory (ANT) and new materialism as a method for the study of interactive documentary. It provides an introduction to aspects of ANT and new materialism, arguing that interactive documentary theory’s ‘matters of concern’ need to be expanded to recognise and discuss the human and nonhuman material actors that make up any interactive documentary. It provides a series of theoretical ‘sketches’ to illustrate what a materialist study of interactive documentary might be, and how this could be enlarged into a broader field of practice and theory tentatively labelled ‘computational nonfiction’. It concludes with a critique of these ‘sketches’ and begins to detail some of the actors present in the online nonfiction work The Whale Hunt.

I’m Sorry I Don’t Have a Story

I don’t know what this is, which is a strange place from which to begin. This is unsettling, for as an academic I am trained and acculturated to displaying a certainty of manner — a certainty that many of my students and conference colleagues would attest I have down pat. It begins from Bristol. It begins from Alisa Lebow’s presentation at the 2016 i–Docs conference about her interactive documentary Filming Revolution. It begins from what I was reading during my thirty hours of travel between Melbourne and Bristol. It begins from the question that gnawed and nagged at me after Alisa’s keynote in Bristol. It begins in my body. Not much of an introduction, is it? This writing reintroduces hypertext as a specific and material way of making and performing knowledge and proposes it as a valuable precursor to interactive documentary and what I am describing as computational nonfiction. What I say here about hypertext, Filming Revolution as an interactive documentary, and story, are a prolegomena toward what computational nonfiction might be as a broader field that might encompass computers, technodigital practice, and networks. Oh, it was originally written as hypertext, and translating it into something more linear and sequential sees its looping rhythms, redundancies, and recursiveness become clumsy stutterings and repetitions.

A networked voice: speculative transformations of essayistic subjectivity in online environments

ABSTRACTThis paper considers the forming of an essayistic voice in an online interactive documentary called Grey Skies/Blue Skies. Made in the context of project-based research Grey Skies/Blue Skies combines an essayistic voice-over with a collection of short video clips, where each clip has multiple possible relations to other video clips within the documentary. I will speculate the multilinear affordances of Grey Skies/Blue Skies create a form of essayistic voice specific to the online environment. Akerman’s [(1976). News from Home. DVD. Directed by Chantal Akerman. New York: Criterion Collection] News from Home is an essay film which opens a distance between voice-over and panoramic shots of New York City to invite the viewer to think that I will use to see how Grey Skies/Blue Skies realises voice in a multilinear context. From the combined perspectives of multilinear documentary and the essay film this paper will provide a concept of essayistic voice specific to the implications of the network as a particular site for documentary practice.

Soundmaps as iDocs? Modes of Interactivity for Storytelling with Sound

Soundmaps derive an undeniable, often originary, importance from cartographical representation. However, this article proposes to consider soundmaps through a narrative perspective, drawing on the field of interactive documentaries. Like soundmaps, interactive documentaries deal with issues of engagement, participation and interaction. In this sense, and according to Sandra Gaudenzi’s concepts, this article presents an analysis of more than 40 soundmaps focused on their modes of interaction.

Small Effects from Big Causes: The Dialogic Documentary Practice of Natalie Bookchin

In her digital video work Mass Ornament (2009), the Testament series (2009), and Now He's Out in Public and Everyone Can See (2012), US artist Natalie Bookchin gathers clips from video blogs in which people perform dances and discuss personal and political issues, from sexuality to racism to losing their jobs. In this essay, I argue that Bookchin's work makes an important feminist intervention into discourses that either demonize or lionize social media. Utilizing strategies of seriality, database/narrative, and orchestration, Bookchin crafts a set of composite found footage texts that challenge both documentary form that relies on typicality or composites and interactive documentaries that employ online engagement. Instead, highlighting the body and the utterance as political “contact zones,” Bookchin uses sonic composition and choreography to challenge restricted notions of political speech, demonstrating the simultaneous insignificance and importance of the everyday. Her work therefore highlights the problematic of communicability that the excess of online textual expression presents while at the same time holding out the possibility that—through listening—engaged, dialogic documentary might provide a powerful antidote to the logics of neoliberalism.

Civic participation and interactive documentaries: a contribution to the open government model

This research introduces the marriage between interactive documentaries (i-docs) and politics as an opportunity to motivate new civic participation and expression in the political sphere. The main objective of this study is to identify the different degrees of civic participation that i-docs permit and to setup a classification according to these levels of engagement. In order to achieve the main objective, this research has analyzed a group of documentaries using a mixture of Gaudenzi, Gifreu-Castells, and Nash methodology. The results show that it is possible to find a parallel between the closed mode and the Orwellian model; the semi-closed mode and the Tokenism model; the semi-opened mode and the playful model; and between the opened mode and the Athenian model. However, only the opened mode, used in the Global lives documentary, offers a real experience that symbolizes the purest representation of an open government system.

El documental interactivo en la era digital: un análisis del potencia l de creación de públicos recursivos y de lo audiovisual en la etnografía contemporánea

In this article, I consider the documentary in a changing media environment. I argue that the emergence of interactive documentaries in the digital era has transcended the paradigm of representation of reality and created a new one: interaction with it. First, I analyze the emergence of the interactive documentary as well as the literature on this topic. Then I turn to the concept of recursive public to understand its potential for establishing multi-directional relations between users and filmmakers who have common interests. More specifically, I look at documentaries made and socialized in conflict contexts wherein political dimensions become significant. Finally, I reflect on the audiovisual medium as a research methodology itself and not just a tool for disseminating knowledge.

Introducing i‐Docs to geography: exploring interactive documentary's nonlinear imaginaries

This paper introduces interactive documentaries, or i‐Docs, to geography through an analysis of one i‐Doc, Gaza Sderot. I‐Docs are an increasingly popular documentary form. Broadly defined by ‘nonlinear’ spatiotemporal organisation, their interactive capacities enable multiple pathways through documentary footage and materials. It is often suggested that this nonlinearity is politicised by i‐Docs to enable polyvocality and the destabilisation of dominant narratives. I argue that i‐Docs deserve geographical attention for two key reasons. First, if geographers have long explored articulations and reformulations of space‐time through media, then i‐Docs offer an insight into contemporary constructions of nonlinear spatiotemporal imaginaries through an interactive medium. Second, nonlinearity and its politics have also become foundational to geography's own approaches to space‐time, making pertinent the explorations of nonlinearity and its socio‐political implications that engagement with i‐Docs enables. In this context, I analyse Gaza Sderot to explore its construction of a nonlinear spatiotemporal imaginary and question the political perspectives that imaginary generates for its subject of the Gaza conflict. In concluding, I also suggest that i‐Docs could be a valuable methodological tool for geographers.

Choreographies of collaboration: social engagement in interactive documentaries

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes new opportunities for using interactive non-linear documentary as social change interventions. Through a series of in-depth conversations with socially engaged Canadian directors, producers and distribution strategists, we discuss how they are reconfiguring their production and outreach in a rapidly shifting and increasingly collaborative media environment. We focus on three recent projects produced or co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada: Here at Home, Highrise and Fort McMoney. The projects address key social issues in Canada including housing, poverty, urbanization, oil production and the environment and are each quite distinct in form as well as strategies of collaboration and engagement. This in-depth analysis of three projects has permitted us to explore interesting tensions and innovations with regard to strategic partnerships and emerging social engagement practices.