Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate

Description

racing continuities in digital and documentary practices, this book is a study of interactive documentary from the perspective of documentary culture. Exploring the dizzying array of new documentary forms that have emerged in the past ten years, the book is grounded in the analysis of multiple recent examples of digital documentary work, drawing out the key issues that the work raises. These issues provide a starting point for theoretical reflection, with each chapter developing concepts and frameworks to facilitate thinking with and through interactive documentary. The book explores questions of polyvocality, participation, and political voice, as well as the sociality and performativity of digital documentary practice. By thinking deeply and critically about interactive documentary practice, the book charts the many and various ways in which interactive documentaries claim the real – contingently, partially, or, in some cases, collectively. Each chapter draws on a range of examples – from digital games to data visualisations, database documentaries to virtual reality – demonstrating how we might engage with these ‘unstable’ digital texts. The book will be particularly valuable for students and researchers keen to make connections between documentary and digital media scholarship. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Interactive documentary: theory and debate Interactive documentary as (hybrid) documentary Dimensions of interactivity Engaging realities, shifting regimes of truth Interactive Documentary: outline and approach 1. Documentary databases: on (not) telling stories in the possibility space Documentary database desires Structuring the possibility space: the braided voice of the database documentary Narrative databases The database as narrative plus archive Forking path narratives Parallel narratives Modular narrative Non-narrative database documentaries Categorical databases The mosaic database The poetic database 2. Participatory intensities: exploring interactive documentary practice Participation: a response to the problem of power in documentary making Interactive documentary: a participatory continuum Framing a microanalysis of interactive documentary participation Interactive documentary participation: exploring participatory intensities Participatory intensities and documentary practices 3. Interactive documentary and the political: civic cultures and convening publics Nurturing citizens: interactive documentary and civic cultures 4. Reality effects: simulation as interactive documentary practice Simulation: imitating and approximating realities Revealing realities: documentary practice as touchstone Simulation and the documentary ambition of digital games Conclusions 5. Stepping into the story for good: virtual reality (VR) and empathy in the context of first-person media Immersion and presence: VR as first-person media Being there or being them: exploring first-person positioning in VR experiences Being there: tourist, encounter, witness VR for good: the pro-social VR agenda and the empathy debate Stepping into the story for good: possibilities and further questions 6. The petabyte (anti)sublime: big data, knowledge, and interactive documentary Documentary and ‘big data’: two pre-digital ideas Big data: the myth of epistemic revolution The sublime and anti-sublime: data visualisation and knowledge Exploring digital oralities: interactive documentary and data Beyond visualisation: gesturing toward a broader research agenda Conclusion: from ‘mass extinction’ to renewal? A mass extinction? From algorithms to explainable AI? Understanding ‘users’/‘participants’ (in context) Questions of ethics Bibliography Index