From a draft of an article that puts forward propositions for documentary designers (Seth Keen, 2016)

9. The documentary designer understands granularity as an affordance where fragments of content are independent, and offering meaning in a self-sufficient way. They are conscious of how the degree of granularity affects the complexity of the system of relations that is created.

In making a documentary, shots are recorded then edited together on a timeline to make a linear work. The completed documentary is one video file made up of numerous shots. In contrast, computers and the network provide the option to present video as separate files, what Manovich in The Language of New Media (2001) describes as “modularity”. For Manovich, modularity is the notion that digital media is made up of independent parts that can be divided into smaller units that can remain separate. Modularity then describes granularity, and granularity, as Miles in “Programmatic Statements for a Facetted Videography”, explains:

Granularity is a term that is appropriated from hypertext and refers to the smallest meaningful unit within a system. In hypertext this would be a node, in a blog it would probably be a post, and in video this is the shot. Obviously what constitutes “smallest” and “meaningful” are sensitive to different contexts, so that in classical hypertext a node could contain a single word, a phrase, or several paragraphs, as could a blog post, and of course a shot could be of extremely brief duration through to the recent examples of 90 minute plus continuous takes. (2008, 223)

The ability to keep video as separate granules represents a significant change for documentary makers in regards to how relations between shots are structured. Now the documentary designer is faced with multiple relations between shots, and determining the scale of granularity, and subsequently the level of complexity of the work is a key decision. As Brooks suggests “by using smaller story granules, there are more ways in which they can fit together” (1996, 327).

References:

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Miles, Adrian. “Programmatic Statements for a Facetted Videography.” In Video Vortex Reader: Responses to Youtube, edited by Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, 223–230. Amsterdam: XS4All, 2008.

Brooks, Kevin M. “Do Story Agents Use Rocking Chairs? The Theory and Implementation of One Model for Computational Narrative.” ACM Press, 1996. 317–328.