I really liked the discussion on interactive documentaries in the seventh unlecture, focusing on how to describe and define a documentary that utilises the hypertextual format.

I think from all the genres and mediums, hypertext has one of the strongest, and potentially most positive, effect on the documentary, transforming from a the very ‘high school’, boring, and dull movie/radio program etc, to an engaging, interactive, and captivating amalgamation that lets the reader choose what to investigate.

Interactive documentaries can involve a combination of text, video, audio, and most importantly, hyperlinks, allowing the user to pick where to go next and what to discover. Instead of just watching a linear documentary, we can now only focusing on what is important or interesting to us.

I think the most exciting part of interactive documentaries is that you, as the reader/user, can become actively involved in this reality, assisting in informing and giving insight into the specific topic, and making it much more accessible for use in education.

I found this list of six innovative interactive documentaries, which separates them into three categories:

1. Semi-closed: where the user can browse the content but cannot change it.
2. Semi-open: where the user can actively participate but not actually change the structure.
3. Completely open: where the user and the documentary interact with each other and adapt to each other.

This interactive documentary about Pine Point, a Canadian documentary that disappeared in the 1980s, is an example of a semi-closed interactive documentary, but even this format still actively involves the viewer. You can obviously tell that it is focused on text, and in the past, this text would have been the whole documentary, but with the added ability to choose what to read and where to go, and the combination of video, pictures, and text, it is a much more exciting documentary.

A great example of a semi-open interactive documentary is Prison Valley, which focuses on a town whose economy is entirely reliant on its 13 prisons. This one brilliantly incorporates a diverse range of mediums: TV documentary, online documentary, a book, an iPhone app, social media, and an actual exhibition. The documentary is in the style of a road trip, and you can choose where to stop and what detours to take, and become actively involved in the real story that is being told.

As that website sites, this is still a relatively new format, and a completely open one hasn’t been properly produced. However, many are still getting close, mostly involving the readers sending in their own stories and videos etc, forming a new documentary each time.

My favourite out of the interactive documentaries that I found was ‘Clouds Over Cuba’, detailing the Cuban Missile Crisis. It allows you to scroll through the timeline and pick out any news articles, TV footage, articles and everything else to read. If you need the background information then you can easily access it, but if you already know it, you don’t have to waste your time with it. It also includes a fascinating ‘what might have been section’. In further efforts to include the audience, this documentary also allows you to connect through social media, to collect ‘dossiers’ of information and sync with mobile phones.

For me, interactive documentaries are a very exciting aspect of hypertext, allowing these stories to become more accessible and interesting, and in the future, and as hypertext becomes increasingly ‘the norm’, they will only become more innovative.