Traditional Documentary Research Articles

Response, News, and Observation: Typologies of Communication in VR Documentaries

The combination of virtual reality (VR) technology and documentary style creates VR documentaries with distinctive image characteristics. This kind of image with its special spatial interaction, sense of presence, and immersion counters the one-way cognitive thinking of traditional documentary and reshapes its media properties with VR technology, which in turn generates new perception, identity, emotional experience, and understanding in the context of virtual immersive documentary image dissemination.

The Influence of The Chinese Documentary A Bite of China Upon Short Videos of Food Scouts on Chinese Media Platform

In today's Internet fragmented information age, short video has become a popular information dissemination medium, and the short video industry also has a place in the category of new media. In short videos, the popularity of food shopping videos has been high. This paper mainly discusses the progress of short food shop video, and studies how it extracts inspiration from traditional documentary A Bite of China, emulates shooting methods, and integrates actual content with audience emotion. This can give people a better understanding of how short videos have improved by exploring the reasons for the popularity of food inspection videos. Through interviews with experienced food shop bloggers, this paper further explores the source of inspiration in the production of food videos and its impact on creators: Food documentaries, such as A Bite of China, help creators take many of the techniques of documentary and storytelling and apply them to their own video production, allowing creators to pay more attention to detail and personal style expression. The conclusion of this paper is that the blogger of food shop draws inspiration from A Bite of China, learns from the aspects of shooting more exquisite food scenes, video content and style, imitating the music, adding more science popularization, and integrating the audience's emotions, and has achieved great success in the short video of food shop.

The Evolution of Scotland's Towns: Creation, Growth and Fragmentation. Edited by E. Patricia Dennison. Edinburgh University Press. 2018. xvii + 350pp. £24.99.Northern England and Southern Scotland in the Central Middle Ages. Edited by Keith J. Stringer and J. L Angus.Boydell Press. 2017. xvi + 369pp. Price not stated.Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City. Edited by Michael Brown and Katie Stevenson.

The Evolution of Scotland's Towns: Creation, Growth and Fragmentation. Edited by E. Patricia Dennison. Edinburgh University Press. 2018. xvii + 350pp. £24.99.Northern England and Southern Scotland in the Central Middle Ages. Edited by Keith J. Stringer and J. L Angus.Boydell Press. 2017. xvi + 369pp. Price not stated.Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City. Edited by Michael Brown and Katie Stevenson.

Reconfiguring Archives in Interactive Documentaries

Besides presenting a creative account of reality as a digital format, the interactive documentary plays with the interconnectedness of intermediality by assembling various audio and visual sensory modalities, including moving images, photography, illustration, animation, text, and sound (Whitelaw 2002; Aston and Gaudenzi 2012; Nash 2021). Following this train of thought, using archival footage may open creative possibilities, as it entails repurposing historical, institutional, or personal audiovisual materials into new narratives. Several authors (Russel 1999; Bruzzi 2006; Haggith 2012; Baron 2014) have significantly contributed to the critical reflection on the use of archives within traditional documentary forms, considering the historical, creative, and ethical layers of such content manipulation. On the other hand, archives in interactive documentaries still require more critical analysis, as archival footage drifts from its indexical nature (Haggith 2012) through decontextualization or repurposing, affecting the textuality of the interactive narrative. This paper aims to merge these two territories and analyze how archival footage contributes to an epistemological account of reality in interactive documentaries. Drawing upon De Jong’s (2012) taxonomy to classify how archives are used in traditional documentaries, we analyze how two interactive documentaries - Welcome to Pine Point (Simmons and Shoebridge 2011) and A Short History of the Highrise (Cizek 2013) - reuse and repurpose analogue archives, while interplay these archival materials with other multimedia formats. Departing from the traditional formats of documentary film, De Jong identifies the following uses of archive footage: i) the archive as an illustration (a visual reference and indexical clue); ii) as a historical backdrop (a historical framework and context for the narrative); iii) a metaphorical tool (to produce subjective layers of meaning or create critical or ironic tones); iv) a narrative resource (to create a new dramatic narrative); v) and the archive as legal evidence (an indexical link to past events, referring to legal circumstances). De Jong’s taxonomy provides a methodological framework for the development of this study, which also aims to analyze the documentaries through the concept of “archive-image” (Didi-Huberman 2008); i. e., how archives are used in interactive documentaries and the meaning deriving from how such footage is placed within the navigation structure of the interface, contributing to the multimodal narrative. We argue that interactive documentary provides a territory of engagement and continuous momentum to revive the past by using the archive as historical validation and a shared collective memory space while reimagining new readings and engendering multiple archival imaginaries.

Aural Authenticity and Reality in Soundscape of VR Documentary

The documentary concept is a 'notoriously slippery eel,' or even the slipperiest one in the history of cinema (Kahana, 2016). With the involvement of virtual reality in the production of documentaries, the dialectic between virtuality and authenticity makes this concept even more elusive. Does documentary exist in VR films? When the spaces and mise-en-scène of the documentary are all artificially created through computing software, can it still be considered an authentic form of a documentary? How can this sub-genre of documentary continue to exist as a kind of proclaimed ‘non-fiction’ when the film is based entirely on fictional visual input? This paper aims to put the discussion on visual realities aside and provides a perspective for understanding how real auditory characteristics are built up in virtual environments (VE) of virtual reality documentaries. We develop this argument in three parts. In the first part, we define a virtual reality documentary and distinguish it from other virtual reality films based on Bill Nichols’s analysis of the boundary between traditional documentary and other types of films. Then, we describe the design and implementation of the aural simulation systems with HRTF (Head-Related Transfer Function) in virtual reality documentary sound design to illustrate how it could reproduce realistic physical hearing for viewers. In the final part, we explore the concept of ‘soundscape’ as it applies to VR documentaries, attempting to show that the sense of authenticity in the audition is related to generating the genius loci (spirit of place) of the viewers based on the case analysis of Anne Frank House VR. Such a spirit of place is embedded in the hearing experience of those who experienced it.

Giving immigrants a voice: exploring migration and identity in the video series Germania

In 2016, the German production company funk began a new weekly series of short documentary videos, Germania, designed to explore German identity and the reality of those living with a migration background. Although one in five people in Germany today have a migratory background, the focus of the series, according to promotional materials, was not the immigration debate (which has consumed much of public policy since 2015) but rather the fact that Germany has long been a land of immigration and is today firmly a multicultural society. Each video, ranging between 5 and 15 minutes, portrays a well-known young artist who talks in first-person about identity, their roots, and the geographies that have shaped and impacted them as well as their perspectives on Germany. The series eschews the traditional documentary format in favor of digital media and a YouTube/TikTok aesthetic. This article explores a select number of these videos and analyzes the concept of identity that they convey as well as the format chosen as a kind of synthesis of traditional documentary and digital media.

History of Medicine as a bridge between Paleopathology and the Medical Humanities. New Technologies Applied to Bioarchaeology: reconstructing Lifestyles in Ancient Rome

The research project Diseases, health and lifestyles in Rome: from the Empire to the Early Middle Age (PRIN 2015), covered a significant area of research, ranging from the historical and historico-medical content that emerged during the multi-disciplinary investigation on the subject, to the intersection between different methods and approaches and the full enhancement of truly primary sources that included human skeletal remains, food residues, housing situations and burial contexts. From this perspective, the interest in the so-called “material culture” has taken on a more important meaning than the simple response to a conceptual and ideological historiography. Since the 1980s, there has been a sort of limitation regarding a more objective reconstruction of Antiquity. In general, written and iconographic sources convey information that is more or less intentionally mediated by the cultural and anthropological coordinates that produced it, requiring the historian to make a philological exegesis effort that even in the case of manuscripts and epigraphs needs to dialogue with tools of support and writing. On the other hand, the importance of molecular data would be partial and misleading if it were to be based on a more traditional documentary framework. Therefore, the history of medicine, always accustomed to operating in an area dedicated to a mixing of different areas of expertise and study, has once again proved capable of creating a dialogue among areas of study that are seemingly distant from one another. However, these areas of study are complementary, leading to a reliable historical reconstruction. In fact, the choice to focus the investigation on the human body has also inevitably highlighted the οἶκος in which it finds itself. This is part of a dynamic natural and social system, as was perfectly clear to the legislators of the late-Republican period and to doctors of imperial age, including Galen, who were well aware of the connection among health, productive and manufacturing activities, urban planning, pollution and food. Therefore, the anthropological, paleo-pathological and molecular investigation on skeletal remains, in dialogue with the historical-medical, literary and iconographic sources, has become the opportunity for a historical reconstruction. This reconstruction is all the more interesting as it encompasses a time frame that contains the transition from the Late Antiquity to the beginning of the Middle Ages, allowing for the identification of a series of indicators on continuity and discontinuity.

Review: Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary, by Jihoon Kim

Book Review| September 01 2022 Review: Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary, by Jihoon Kim Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary by Jihoon Kim Nora Stone Nora Stone NORA STONE teaches media production and film studies at Birmingham-Southern College. Her monograph, How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960–2022, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar BOOK DATA Jihoon Kim, Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. $125.00 cloth, $39.95 paper. 320 pages. Film Quarterly (2022) 76 (1): 111–113. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2022.76.1.111 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nora Stone; Review: Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary, by Jihoon Kim. Film Quarterly 1 September 2022; 76 (1): 111–113. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2022.76.1.111 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search BOOK DATA Jihoon Kim, Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. $125.00 cloth, $39.95 paper. 320 pages. What is a documentary? Film theorists have mulled this question for decades, but Jihoon Kim takes a capacious view in an effort to draw together the various kinds of media labeled “documentary.” In his new book, Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary, Kim decenters traditional documentary film, focusing instead on gallery installations, activist videos, interactive projects, virtual-reality environments, and experimental cinema. All combine the aims of documentary film with novel uses of digital technology and the affordances of networked communication. While his jumps from i-doc to multiscreen art installation to protest witness video can be dizzying—and lead to questions about milieu and intended audience—Documentary’s Expanded Fields is an ambitious and worthwhile attempt to map the wide array of documentary... You do not currently have access to this content.

Archival Imaginaries

Besides presenting a creative account of reality, in a digital format, interactive documentary plays with the interconnectedness of intermediality by assembling various audio and visual sensory modalities, including moving images, photography, illustration, animation, text, and sound (Whitelaw 2002; Aston and Gaudenzi 2012; Nash 2021). Following this train of thought, the use of archival footage may open up creative possibilities, as it entails the repurposing of historical, institutional, or personal audiovisual materials into new narratives. Several authors (Russel 1999; Bruzzi 2006; Haggith 2012; Baron 2014) have significantly contributed to the critical reflection on the use of archives within traditional documentary forms, taking into account the historical, creative, and ethical layers of such content manipulation. The use of archives in interactive documentaries, on the other hand, is still a topic that requires more critical analysis, as archival footage drifts from its indexical nature (Haggith 2012) through decontextualization or repurposing, affecting the textuality of the interactive narrative. This paper aims to merge these two territories and afford an analysis of how archival footage contributes to an epistemological account of reality in interactive documentaries. Drawing upon De Jong’s (2012) taxonomy to classify how archives are used in traditional documentaries, we analyze how Welcome to Pine Point (Simmons and Shoebridge 2011) and A Short History of the Highrise (Cizek 2013) reuse and repurpose analogue archives, while interplay these archival materials with other multimedia formats. De Jong (2012) identifies the following uses of archive footage: i) the archive as an illustration; ii) as a historical backdrop; iii) a metaphorical tool; iv) a narrative resource; v) and the archive as legal evidence. Furthermore, we analyze the interactive documentaries through the concept of “archive-image” (Didi-Huberman, 2008); i. e. the meaning deriving from how archives are used in interactive documentaries and how such footage is placed in the navigation structure of the interface, contributing to the multimodal narrative. We argue that interactive documentary provides a territory of engagement and continuous momentum to revive the past by using the archive as historical validation, as well as a space of shared collective memories while remaining open to new readings, engendering multiple archival imaginaries.

Aural Authenticity of Virtual Reality Documentary Made in 3D Virtual Environment

The concept of documentary is a 'notoriously slippery eel', or even the slipperiest one in the history of cinema (Kahana, 2016). Movies inside virtual reality are one of the promising talked-about areas in the VR industry. With the involvement of virtual reality in the production of documentaries, the dialectic between virtuality and authenticity makes this concept of documentary even more elusive, especially for VR documentaries made in 3D. In the viewing experience, the virtual environment is built upon computing 'true depth'. This virtual cinematic space is set up through the modelling in software (e.g. Maya and 3D Max) and then to 3D engine (e.g. Unity or Unreal). Therefore, a dialectical critique arises: Do documentary exists in VR films? When the spaces and mise-en-scène of the documentary are all artificially created through computing software, whether it can still be considered as an authentic form of documentary? How can this sub-genre of documentary continue to exist as a kind of proclaimed ‘non-fiction’ when the film is based entirely on fictional visual input? The current discussion on the realistic qualities of VR documentaries focuses on the questioning on the virtual nature of the visual environment and neglects that listening is also part of the experience in this VE. So, is it possible to understand the authenticity of the VR documentary from the perspective of auditory system? This paper provides a perspective for understanding the auditory authenticity of non-fictional restoration of virtual environments (VE) in virtual reality (VR) documentaries. Such a perspective argues that although the VR documentaries are made with 3D modelling and computing engine, their authenticity in sound remains in line with the documentary principle. In the sound design perspective, it simultaneously creates a non-fictional soundscape to reproduce the ‘genius loci’ (spirit of place) based on the real individual perception in history. In the first part of paper, we review how the documentary film has set itself apart as a non-fictional genre based on Bill Nichols’s analysis of the boundary between traditional documentary and its counterparts in cinema. And then we place this principle on aural reality in the context of HRCS (Head-Related Coordinate System) and HRTF (Head-Related Transfer Function) to argue VR documentary as a sub-genre of the documentary film in aural technical basis. In the second part, we explore the concept of ‘soundscape’ in the sound design of VR documentaries, analysing how such a virtual sound environment establishes an authentic spirit of space in the case of Anne Frank House VR. This study only explores the auditory sound in virtual places, and does not address the discussion of artificial fictional sounds outside cinematic space (e.g. music, voice-overs, UI Panel sounds.)

Toward a Nonfiction Cinema of Audience Accountability

FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt muses on the difference between responsibility and accountability in the context of nonfiction cinema’s impulse towards and history of speaking up and back to power. In keeping with his preference for poetic nonfiction over traditional documentary, he considers recent Latin American documentaries that fight against narrative rules in order ask more of their audience. He suggests that filmmakers such as Jonathan Perel, whose Corporate Accountability (2021) he discusses at length, extend this notion of accountability not only to their subjects but to their audience through untraditional approaches that force viewers to sit with their discomfort and actively engage with the images before them.

Where There’s Smoke and the Generative Documentary

<i>Where There’s Smoke</i> and the Generative Documentary

About cognitiveness of information retrieval

A brief specification of concept of “cognitive information search” is provided, which is considered as the construction of a “path of cognition” – an interactive iterative and significantly dependent on the previous result formation of a target fact on a chaotic set of found facts. The result of such a search will be (1) the selection of fragments of documents that meet the real information need (and not copies of documents that meet the expressed need, as in traditional documentary retrieval system), and (2) an interactively generated semantic graph - a conceptual image of solving the user's problem. The assessment of the “cognitiveness” of interactive semantic information search based on an ontographic representation is carried out by comparing the “information” properties of objects and processes characteristic of information search and cognition. The model of the cognition process is presented in the form of interacting functional blocks of processing and storage of information structures.

New Documentary Film Seeks to Be “More Real”

After the birth of documentary film, the discussion of “fiction” and “non-fiction” has not stopped. Influenced by the ideological trend of postmodernism, “new documentary film” overturns the concept of traditional documentary film and believes that it is feasible and meaningful for documentary to take “fiction” as a means. Adhering to the “new” exploration of this documentary, the author discusses the historical origin of new documentary films, the authenticity of new documentary films at home and abroad and the creative techniques of new documentary films, in order to provide innovative support for the true publication of new documentary films.

Attribution in the Statistics Mirror Anonymous Articles in the “Vremya” and “Epokha” Journals Published by the Dostoevsky Brothers’

The attribution of content of Vremya (Time) and Epokha (Epoch) journals, in which many anonymous and pseudonymous articles have been published, presents many challenges for the researchers. In the XIX–XX centuries, a corpus of texts, which were unambiguously attributed to F. M. Dostoevsky, M. M. Dostoevsky, A. A. Grigoriev, N. N. Strakhov and other Vremya and Epokha authors, was formed on the basis of traditional documentary (letters, payroll, income and expense book, memoirs), ideological and thematic and stylistic evidence. The following types of texts were isolated within the corpus of anonymous and pseudonymous articles, author's and collective articles, editorial inserts, notes; by type of writing - authorship, co-authorship, editing and adaptation of others texts. Modern methods of statistical analysis of formal grammatical and syntactic parameters in the text can provide sufficient grounds for expanding the source attribution base. This article presents the results of a study of a number of anonymous articles in the Dostoevsky brothers' journals using three statistical methods of attribution: linguistic and statistical analysis according to the G. Kjetsaa's method, the Transformer neural network and the Random forest algorithm. These results need to be correlated; they should be taken into account as complementary to traditional attribution methods.

Seven types of collaboration

ABSTRACT Although there exists a significant tradition of films made by one person, collaboration has long been a common practice in documentary film production, with new forms of co-creation emerging with the advent of digital media. This poses the problem of how we should interpret films that combine different skills and different creative visions. What is the place of authorship in such a work? Drawing on a range of examples, including some from the author’s own films, this article describes seven types of collaboration in traditional documentary film practice: Dispersed Collaboration, Co-Authorship, Creative Assistance, Subject Collaboration, Sponsorship, Complicity, and Symbiosis. In addition to these, the collaboration of the viewer is crucial to the final realisation of a film. Also discussed in this article are ethnographic filmmaking, relationships among collaborators, and the personal relations between filmmakers and their subjects.

Amplifying the voice of youth through planetary health films

Amplifying the voice of youth through planetary health films

The function of narrative in interactive documentary

ABSTRACT Interactive documentary theory has oversimplified concepts of narrative in order to accentuate the contrast between traditional documentary and interactive documentary. In doing so, there is a risk of imagining the interactive documentary as an impermeable and incomprehensible artefact, resistant to hermeneutic examination. This paper will show that by approaching the question of narrative coherence as a phenomenological proposition, a theory of narrative can be developed which is able to account for interactive documentary traits which are not shared with traditional documentaries. In order to reimagine the role of narrative in interactive documentary, the philosophical approach of Paul Ricoeur will be adapted and extended. Ricoeur’s combination of phenomenology and hermeneutics encourages a nuanced and philosophically rigorous approach to narrative, which helps us expand on the role of narrative in interactive documentary.

Visão social e humana da ciência da informação

A Ciência da Informação (CI), inscrita na vasta área das ciências sociais e humanas, evidencia uma clara dimensão transdisciplinar e, em simultâneo, relações interdisciplinares com outras áreas do conhecimento. Neste artigo, pretende-se analisar a evolução das disciplinas Arquivística (AA), Biblioteconomia (BA), Museologia (MA) e Documentação (DA), e dos respetivos serviços, bem como explicitar a sua convergência para a CI. Para dar cumprimento a tal propósito optou-se por uma abordagem qualitativa de natureza exploratória, traduzida na revisão da literatura. Reconhece-se que persiste o arquétipo da tradicional compartimentação documentalista da informação (IF) pelo espaço institucional e/ou tecnológico onde se conserva. Contudo, é crescente a colaboração e convergência entre Bibliotecas (B), Arquivos (A) e Museus (M), em particular no ambiente digital. Conclui-se que, ao deslocar-se o enfoque do objeto de estudo do documento e/ou da IF para o Ser Humano que a produz e consome, estamos a contribuir para a afirmação de uma CI Social e Humana (CISH).

Jonathan Kahana (1966–2019)

Jonathan Kahana (1966–2019) Dan Streible (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jonathan Kahana and the wall of wine. Photograph by Jennifer Horne, Bologna, 2019. Media scholar, documentary film historian, and cultural theorist Jonathan Kahana was in his prime when a rare form of lung cancer took his life at age fifty-three. He had already made an impact on documentary studies and practice with two major books and had another (on reenactment) in process when he passed away on the last day of 2019. His essays, interviews, and reviews appeared in publications ranging from Critical Inquiry and Jump Cut to Millennium Film Journal and the Brooklyn Rail. As our colleague Dana Polan put it, he had nothing less than "a world-wide reputation as one of the very best historians and interpreters of nonfiction modes of visual communication."1 Yet Kahana's influence on the field went well beyond his incisive writing. He had ongoing dialogue and interaction with media artists, such as Jill Godmilow, John Greyson, and Zoe Beloff. With filmmaker Lynne Sachs, he launched an annual Experimental Lecture series that brought legends of the avant-garde to the Tisch School of the Arts, starting with Barbara Hammer in 2007, followed by Craig Baldwin, Ken Jacobs, and Peggy Ahwesh. Born in Canada, he earned BA and BFA degrees from York University. While at the University of Minnesota for a master's degree (1992) in English, Jonathan met classmate Jennifer Horne. They became life partners and fellow film scholars. Completing a PhD at Rutgers University in 2001, he served as director of film studies at Bryn Mawr College, where he taught for five years. From 2005 to 2012, Kahana was associate professor of cinema studies at New York University (NYU), where he made a large impact. Ultimately, the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz recognized his work and hired him to lead a new Center for Documentary Arts and Research in its innovative Film and Digital Media Department. At NYU, Jonathan was active on several [End Page 305] fronts, which I was fortunate to experience when joining the department's faculty in 2006. Documentary remained his forte and passion, but he used the word capaciously, researching a broad array of nonfiction, hybrid, and experimental forms of media. His 2008 book Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary examines a funky variety of films and texts, bringing reexamination of landmark works into dialogue with neglected ones, such as Teach Our Children (1972), a Third World Newsreel short anonymously directed by teenagers Christine Choy and Susan Robeson. Serendipitously, 2008 also saw the preservation of that film and its screening at the first Orphan Film Symposium in New York, allowing Kahana to do what he did best: facilitate a discussion among scholars, archivists (Pamela Jean Smith of Pacific Film Archives, which preserved Teach Our Children), and filmmakers (Eric Breitbart, member of the Newsreel collective). I benefited from his intellectual curiosity and devotion to archival exploration when we co-taught a new course called Nonfiction Film History. Traditional documentary was part of the course, but home movies, educational films, sponsored films, and newsreels got equal time alongside cinema verité, social documentary, and compilation films. It was exciting. A milestone of his impact on the field and the department came in 2011, when Jonathan organized the international Visible Evidence conference in New York City. He saw to it that many partners and hundreds of speakers participated. He made "Archiving, Preservation, and the Material of Actuality and Documentary" a thread of the event. His wit and love of eclectic forms of media culture were visibly evident throughout. His program notes celebrated the historical diversity of New York's contributions to documentary "from Robert Frank to Grandmaster Flash; from the Workers Film and Photo League to Third World Newsreel; from Arthur Mayer and Iris Barry to Bill Sloan and the Donnell Film Library; from Anthology Film Archives to Women Make Movies; from Emile de Antonio to Jonas Mekas." He cheekily posited that a pair of cine-poems could shape the conference's experience of the Gotham location: Manhatta (1921), "a film whose metro-normative [!] view of modern life was soon enough shaded...