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Interactive documentary is still an emerging field that eludes concise definitions or boundaries. Grounded in practice-based research, this collection seeks to expand the sometimes exclusionary field, giving voice to scholars and practitioners working outside the margins.
Editors Kathleen M. Ryan and David Staton have curated a collection of chapters written by a global cohort of scholars to explore the ways that interactive documentary as a field of study reveals an even broader reach and definition of humanistic inquiry itself. The contributors included here highlight how emerging digital technologies, collaborative approaches to storytelling, and conceptualizations of practice as research facilitate a deeper engagement with the humanistic inquiry at the center of documentary storytelling, while at the same time providing agency and voice to groups typically excluded from positions of authority within documentary and practice-based research, as a whole. This collection represents a key contribution to the important, and vocal, debates within the field about how to avoid replicating colonial practices and privileging.
This is an important book for practice-based researchers as well as advanced-level media and communication students studying documentary media practices, interactive storytelling, immersive media technologies, and digital methodologies.
List of contents
Part 1: Potentials 1. Agency Through Co-Creation: Interactive Documentary as Decolonizing Practice 2. Interactive Documentary: Its History and Future as a Polyphonic Form 3. Choose Your Own Generation: Interactive LGBTQ+ Narratives From South Asian Families 4. Documentary Impact: A Framework for Analyzing Engagement Strategies Used in i-docs Part 2: Collaborations 5. Democratizing Documentary and Interactive Social Media Practices 6. An Outsider Approach to Cinematography: Native Representation, Breaking the Norms and Finding New Ways to Explore Indigenous Spaces 7. Reframing Creative Practice for Telling Factual Stories Of War And Trauma Through Oral History Interactive Documentary (OHID) Part 3: Poetics 8. Interactive Multispecies Documentary Methods in Wretched Waters: The Slow Violence of the Rio Doce Disaster 9. On Histories of Dispersal, the Missing Pictures and Ways of Knowing: The Artist’s Space Redefined for a Plural Art Practice 10. Decolonizing Transmedia Practices: An Essay on Editing Part 4: Technologies 11. Between Self and Other: Propositions for Non-Dualistic Research on VR 12. Beyond Technology’s Promise: Building Trust, Owning Narrative, Self-Authorship, and the Power of Storytelling! 13. Desert Stars: Effectuation and Co-Creation in a Research-Creation i-doc Part 5: Expanding Boundaries 14. Guerrilla Archaeology and Ancient Aliens: Countering the Mediascapes of Stigmatized Knowledge 15. Responding to Tension 16. In the Light of Memory 17. Expanding Boundaries, Indigenous and Migrant Cartographies: Counter-Mapping the Inter-National Relations of the Odeimin Runners Club
About the author
Kathleen M. Ryan is a documentary filmmaker and an associate professor of journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her hybrid work focuses on transformations in storytelling due to shifting media technologies. Specifically, she explores the intersection of theory and praxis within evolving media forms such as interactive documentary. Her projects deal with issues of gender, self-identity, visuality, and user/participant agency.
David Staton is an associate professor at the University of Northern Colorado where he teaches in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies. His areas of research include visual communication, ethics, and sports journalism. He has been involved in the production of three feature-length documentary films, which have been screened internationally. Ghost Resort, his first experimental documentary short, is now at festival.
Summary
Interactive documentary is still an emerging field that eludes concise definitions or boundaries. Grounded in practice based research, this collection seeks to expand the sometimes exclusionary field, giving voice to scholars and practitioners working outside the margins.
