This paper casts light on cultural heritage storytelling in the context of interactive documentary, a hybrid media genre that employs a full range of multimedia tools to document reality, provide ...sustainability of the production and successful engagement of the audience. The main research hypotheses are enclosed in the statements: (a) the interactive documentary is considered a valuable tool for the sustainability of cultural heritage and (b) digital approaches to documentary storytelling can provide a sustainable form of viewing during the years. Using the Greek interactive documentary (i-doc) NEW LIFE (2013) as a case study, the users’ engagement is evaluated by analyzing items from a seven-year database of web metrics. Specifically, we explore the adopted ways of the interactive documentary users to engage with the storytelling, the depth to which they were involved along with the most popular sections/traffic sources and finally, the differences between the first launch period and latest years were investigated. We concluded that interactivity affordances of this genre enhance the social dimension of cultural, while the key factors for sustainability are mainly (a) constant promotion with transmedia approach; (b) data-driven evaluation and reform; and (c) a good story that gathers relevant niches, with specific interest to the story.
Immigrant space – a place of convergence of multiple movements – engenders through rhythms of the everyday and an art of inhabitation of its people. It comprises stories of resilience that must be ...amplified and celebrated, especially when they are at a threat of erasure on account of systemic and structural violence, and/or a lack of concerted effort to document them. Little Pakistan is one such immigrant space inhabited by Pakistani Americans in Brooklyn, New York City. In this article, I propose a framework titled ‘Engender(ing)’ for a rediscovery of meanings vested in immigrant space, explaining its emergence and expansion across forms, delimitations and associations. The framework is then applied through a confluence of collaborative storytelling and interactive documentary. The outcome, Little Pakistan – Future Histories, is an interactive documentary project presented as a case study, with people – artist, community, publics – assuming the role of ‘innovators of meanings’ to rediscover Little Pakistan as an ‘ensemble of meanings’. I infer that this framework and its praxis offer promise for future collaborative new media documentary practice and research in the context of other immigrant enclaves, neighborhoods and similarly structured spaces.
This article intends to explore how interactivity and new technologies promote new spectatorship performances and subsequently affect the interactor's subjectivity. Through the analysis of three ...interactive documentaries, I propose and describe a taxonomy for addressing
the felt experience of interacting in digital environments. Each selected documentary corresponds to a different mode of interaction and, therefore, engages the audience in a particular way: Bear 71 (hyperlink mode), Fort McMoney (conversational mode) and A Journal of Insomnia
(participative mode). Throughout the analysis, I consider the interactor and the digital object as two interrelated and dependent entities that influence and shape one another. I argue the objects of interaction affect the viewers by inducing bodily felt sensations and shaping their
subjectivity. As so, the sensuous encounter between the interactor and the digital documentary provides a virtual gratification for the spectator's performance. Delving into a phenomenological and post-phenomenological investigation, I focus my attention in the microperceptions, as structures
of sensory perception in the bodily dimensions of experience, translated as senses. As fragmented, multilinear and dynamic forms, interactive documentaries provide the audience with the agency of manipulating and developing the narrative, while conversely engender in the interactors what I
address as ways of affection. I propose or adapt eight digitally disrupted and induced sensations, or senses of, for describing how interactive documentary affects users during the interaction performance: sense of control, sense of presence, sense of Self, sense of place, sense of
belonging, sense of almightiness, sense of endlessness, sense of incompleteness.
Starting from the premises that documentary assemblages are networks in the sense that they are not given but need to be established and are in constant flux leads us to the assessment that any ...interactive documentary environment is a collaboratory but also precarious endeavour. In
this context, bringing into dialogue network theories, namely ANT 'and after', the concept of 'assemblage' and discourses around participation and co-creation can lead to fresh perspectives on different strategies and tactics of participation in collaborative factual
storytelling. Still, two aspects need to be revisited: the symmetric approach to networks and the notion of distributed agency. These concepts will be discussed in terms of their value to derive strategies and tactics of (shared) authorship, the striving for a documentary argument and documentary
authority on the one hand and participation, interaction and plurivocality on the other hand. In this regard, ANT makes certainly inspiring points but also has its shortcomings. One solution can consist in relating the axiom of ANT as an analytic tool to actual documentary long-term strategies
as well as to stand-up tactics as, e.g. interventionist media-making, open space documentary and context-provision. Thinking of emerging documentary configurations not only in terms of hybrid transdisciplinary, transprofessional networks but pragmatic worknets can lead to a better understanding
of how to balance different agents within these networks|worknets - always keeping in mind that we are dealing with an approach that calls for constant self-reflection as it presents a case of what Law describes as 'uncertain method'. All theoretical reflections are accompanied
by an analysis of a paradigmatic documentary networks|worknet, The Quipu Project (2015).
This paper uses a content analysis methodology to investigate the potential of immersive journalism and interactive documentary (I-Docs) to cover climate change content. Interactive documentaries ...convey information in many innovative formats, yet changing patterns of media consumption and the negative impact of misinformation can reduce their communicative effectiveness. Therefore, this article explores how we can identify different interactive structures and theoretical frameworks to help ensure I-Docs leverage the potential of emerging techniques to communicate climate change content effectively. This is increasingly important as climate change predictions become exponentially severe, and misinformation continues to distort the scientific consensus surrounding climate change during the Anthropocene. We investigate the thematic and structural properties of three interactive documentary works: "The Last Generation: Climate Change and the Marshall Islands", "This is Climate Change: Melting Ice" and "Offshore". Our results show how these divergent examples of I-Docs sit within current frameworks of Immersive Journalism and can use complex, non-linear narrative structures to explore environmental issues. We argue that the gamification of I-Doc work and the embedding of inoculation techniques offer the potential to engage audiences and reduce their susceptibility to climate change misinformation.
The do-it-yourself (DIY) media culture on the internet is often attached to the power of ordinary users to produce, reproduce, and disseminate content in a decentralised communication platform. The ...same ethos of self-sufficiency facilitates the proliferation of new style and interactive documentaries designed by professional-amateurs and distributed mainly for the web. No longer the sole province of highly funded media experiments, the creation of interactive projects has been conceivable with the assistance of open source and off-the-shelf authoring software. The present case study investigates this trend by drawing on a post-textual analysis of the author's independently produced and DIY interactive documentary (i-doc). Using a practitioner-researcher perspective, I explain the creative decisions involved in producing a political i-doc and interrogate how a website performs as a format of small-scale independent documentary project. I argue that the implication of DIY ethos on i-doc production is twofold: it reminds us to focus on functionality over beauty and prompts us to prioritise the story over interactivity. This article concludes on the potential of DIY ethos to fuel the production of citizen i-docs in the Global South.
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.
Interaction and visualization together yield an interesting, fruitful, and promising combination for producing content in digital news media. In an era in which the press no longer exclusively ...provides the news, interaction and visualization combined in innovative products for the public are powerful value propositions for the media. Together, they are capable of winning readers’ loyalty and engagement, both of which are crucial for the media’s sustainability. In this work, we present a review of the literature and formulate the theoretical bases for this binomial pairing and its main components, which, we argue, should be available to citizens, the interests of whom journalism must defend if it aspires to be viable.
This article explores the intersections between interactive documentary and digital rights, across notions of surveillance, privacy and data. The collection of personal and sensitive data online ...increases exponentially, and individuals become a series of data points, only of relevance
insofar as we are part of a larger group marked by similar characteristics. Yet somewhat contradictorily, we are also scrutinized completely. How might creative media production bridge this gap - recognizing our individual complexity while respecting rights to privacy? Documentary media
offers one response - individual stories and voices can serve to flesh out a complex story while retaining links to a broader narrative. Interactive documentary, furthermore, can offer a reflexive form of storytelling that uses the very forms of technology in question to highlight the
potential problems. This article presents case studies of interactive documentaries, exploring how the strategies of reflexivity and responsiveness can engender an understanding of issues of digital rights.
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