Assignment 4: Project Work
on Month: May 2018
on Assignment 4: Development (4/4)
on In my final development post for this assignment (and subject :'( ) I will write about both weeks 11 and 12 because nothing major happened in just one week.
Week 11 began on a lonely note as I was the only one from the group in class. I discussed our project with Hannah and we began to digress about patterns of participating in online platforms, and how much we upload ourselves. I think its interesting because over the past year (as this topic was also relevant in my previous studio) I have ranted quite a bit about how the internet is such a lawless land in terms of regulation (in Australia at least), in that anyone can put anything on the internet, and that has resulted in an unfathomable abyss of content. However… I so rarely contribute to the abyss myself! Hannah said that maybe people are slowing down on putting content on the internet because the more there is, the harder it is to find and the more difficult it is to give it significant meaning (in a sea of almost identical content).
But I really don’t think people are slowing down. I know multiple people who just recently started YouTube vlogging, despite my own reaction of Who On Earth Cares? But genuinely, I am only seeing an increase in uploaded content, but in terms of myself, I rarely upload content. I am a constant lurker, engaging with content by liking, but the only comments I make are tagging my friends, and I almost never upload my own content (to facebook or youtube for example).
The most frequent type of content I contribute to the abyss is what I would call useful but simple content- namely reviews. I am a huge internet review reader- of cultural products (films, books, etc), of restaurants, of nail salons, of recipes, of prescription skin care, of clothes, you name it! If its a product I am paying money for I will find a review for it before buying, and if I have had a particularly successful or unsuccessful experience, you can bet the internet will hear about it.
Quite a digression indeed, but it is actually relevant to our project. We have spent the last few weeks working out what our Crash Course Facebook page will be used for. I came to realise if I ~experienced~ our project (without knowing what it was), I would be happy to ‘like’ the Facebook page, and like posts it shares, but I would almost never post on the page myself. Now, this can’t be generalised to the rest of the internet world, but it does show that you cannot force people to contribute or even participate, and you shouldn’t let yourself rely on it.
For this reason, the Facebook page will exist as a promotional page for the project, and also a place for discussion about travel, but the discussion will be mainly facilitated by the page, i.e. we will not rely on people to generate conversation. In our class feedback session, someone suggested having a monthly theme (about travel and the like) on the facebook page, that we post about and users can also engage with (if they wish). I really like this idea as it does not rely on contribution but also allows for user-contribution and two-way communication.
My strong realisation that you cannot force people to contribute also came around due to my difficulties in getting my friends to contribute to the project after I asked them specifically. I totally understand the situation- someone asks you to do something which you aren’t invested in, you’re happy to do it but forget about it because it is not a priority and you have to make the effort yourself to complete the task. It took many messages reminding my friends to do it, and even then they were apprehensive about recording their voice. For this reason, I have concluded these projects either need to clearly offer something to contributors, or the content should be collected directly by the producers, i.e. vox pops where people have to answer on the spot.
Luckily by now, we have actually increased our content numbers a lot. It definitely wasn’t as much as we had initially wanted, but it still looks really good. As of right now, we have 31 markers, and a range of both sound/image and text. The great thing about this project is that it will never end (as I have mentioned previously). Sure, people might stop contributing, but the fact that people will always be able to contribute means it is still an evolving project. In an ideal world, it would just keep expanding. But I’m still quite happy with how far we’ve gotten in this time.
Assignment 4: Development (3/4)
on Research
The article I found while researching for this assignment was, in fact, a Ph.D. Antonia also found it, but she focused on the first chapter while I read the fifth. It is called The Living Documentary: from representing reality to co-creating reality in digital interactive documentary, and it is by Sandra Gaudenzi from the University of London.
I will first focus on Antonia’s reading as it is the precursor to my own. The most relevant part of this chapter is where Gaudenzi defines different modes of interactive documentary. She defines the conversational, the hypertext, the participatory and the experiential mode. These modes vary between levels of interactivity, between the ability to browse but not change the content of documentaries, to be able to participate/produce content but not change the structure, then to the content and structure continually changing in accordance with user interaction.
Crash Course fits within the participatory mode, in which the user has the ability to add content, but not change the structure. Interestingly enough, for a moment in the early development, we were going to allow users to change the structure. Before we decided it was too risky, we were considering using the collaborative function of Google to allow anyone to change, add, delete markers (with the hope that they would just add). Given that we have taken away this ability, they can now only add content (and still that is filtered through us). This relates to something mentioned in Jackson’s research (Getting our hands dirty (again): Interactive documentaries and the meaning of images in the digital age), that interactivity in documentary can be split into four stages- observation, exploration, modification and reciprocal change. While observation is also fundamental in linear documentary, the other stages rely on the opportunity to interact and participate.
In the fifth chapter, Gaudenzi delves deeper into the participatory mode of documentary. She explains that with the invent of Web 2.0, allowing all internet users to create and upload content, documentary makers have started to do the previously unthinkable, and engage audiences in the production of the documentary. Even within the participatory documentary, there are infinite ways of participating and collaborating. Different forms are created depending on the type of participation- user-testing ideas, crowdsourcing content (like us!) commenting, etc) and the stage of production that allows participation- pre-production, production or post-production.
Different levels of participation seem to lead to different degrees of openness of the final artefact, going from a finished, and therefore closed, linear documentary to an open Web documentary that keeps changing and expanding through time and user participation.
Our documentary is just that- one that (theoretically) will keep changing and expanding through time. There is no finished product, there will never be a ‘whole’ documentary as it will constantly evolve. Even more so because of our Facebook page, which is bound by the laws of social media- a constantly changing and flowing platform.
Our project is made entirely of User Generated Content- making our role as producers to “redistribute and mould” the content. Gaudenzi describes projects such as ours as a “piece of a puzzle of vaster multi-platform story world”, explaining that the multiple platforms exist as marketing for the main project, to extend the lifecycle of the documentary. This is effectively what we are trying to achieve with the Crash Course Facebook- both adding bulk to the project but also adding an avenue of discovery.
The project that I focused on when researching was the Viewfinders project. It is very similar to our own in that it is made of UGC, based on a map and contains markers or icons on the map flag posting where content is from. It works differently from ours as there is also some kind of keyword system which I can’t quite seem to work out. There is also a suggested path through the content (there is a ‘next’ button when you are watching a video’), unlike ours where it is totally user controlled as to what order they experience content in. This project was a big influence in making our own (for me at least). When we first thought of replicating our original Korsakow project on a map, Viewfinders was what I thought of. Interestingly, when you google Viewfinders it takes you immediately to the website where you can contribute, and it isn’t totally obvious how to get to the actual project. I like the way we have done it, wherein people want to contribute after they have experienced the project (hopefully) rather than contributing without experiencing it.
Antonia’s project that she found, The Fight for Fallujah, is not participatory but it is immersive. I can’t find a heap of connections between our projects, except for the fact that the story being told is truly awful, and our project is reminiscent (on a very lesser level) of this, in that the user is hearing a lot of bad, and sometimes truly awful stories, that are totally foreign to them.
Assignment 4: Development (2/4)
on This week we have continued to make good progress in our project. At the start of the week, Antonia and I continued to upload all of our videos from the last project into the Google MyMaps software. That is more or less where the project is now: it has 13 markers/clips, awaiting some fine tuning and for some more clips to be added. But for now, it looks good! There is something really exciting about seeing all of our videos all over the map, as it shows the diversity of locations in the story.
We also set up a google form for the content submission (and simultaneously the release form). Originally we were going to ask for a youtube link, but in Thursday’s class, we worked out that we could allow file submission within the google form. This is much better- as people can just submit the audio file and image, rather than having to edit them together and put it on YoutTube, which could easily be seen as too much effort, consequently reducing the number of people submitting content and generally lowing the success of the project.
Something else we are doing to ensure success is adding more content before we release the project publically. This means we are all getting three more videos/stories before Monday, so then when we put it out to a larger group of people it looks popular and more enticing to contribute to. I suppose one of the main questions that we have going forward is, how are we going to get people to contribute to the project? Especially if we are not asking people specifically, but just trying to market the project to the public generally. Ultimately, it is important that we identify what are people going to get out of contributing to the project?
Jackson discussed the project he had found for our group research, Out My Window. This project, which I have mentioned previously, focuses on life inside highrise buildings. Its interface allows you to pick a window as to enter someone’s home (in a highrise), where you are presented with multiple media elements (360 video, image, text etc). As explored in the research article Jackson found, users of Out My Window can “find other links that may lead them to discover further personal details of the character’s life story”. Every media element leads the user on a deeper path through the story the documentary is presenting.
This idea lead Jackson to the idea of creating a Facebook group and linking it to the project so that after people had either contributed to it or just viewed it, they would be able to be taken down another, more personal avenue of the theme. Originally he thought of a group on Facebook which contributors could join, and discuss their travel experiences further and give tips to one another. The rest of us liked the idea but suggested it could be less intimate- potentially just a page that people can like, as people are probably going to feel more comfortable liking a page than they are joining a group.
And so was born the Crash Course Facebook page. Still in development, what this page will function as exactly is yet to be determined. There are a variety of options, including a place to share more informtion about the stories from the project or a place where people can post travel tips and the like. As we get more content in the following weeks we will develop this page accordingly to make sure it is suitable accompanying material to the project.
Assignment 4: Development (1/4)
on After presenting our Assignment 4 and getting feedback, our group decided that we wanted to continue expanding our project, sticking with the same content idea but moving it into new territories. We decided the main way in which we will do so is expand the project to include user-generated content.
At the start of this week, I was the only one in class so I did a basic expansion of this idea after Hannah ran through the assignment parameters. A new requirement of the project is that it includes at least two media types- i.e. video and text, image and text, image and video, and so on. While also thinking about user-contribution, this reminded me of the twitter feeds from the Are You Happy project- and gave me the idea for our project of including social media text contributions. In a perfect world, this would be automated, but more realistically will involve us entering the tweets/text into the project manually. Nonetheless, this adds another dimension to the project, and also would encourage more submissions (if people can’t record their voice, they can easily write it down!)
Making the Biggest/Big/Small chart, I settled on a short summary of our project: an online, interactive project that explores the theme of bad (or unlucky) travel experiences. It will have the characteristics of modularity, interactivity, variability, multi-linearity, and user-generated content. The scale will be as large as possible.
While researching similar projects and academic writings to influence our project, the next few questions directly relating to our project were what software is accessible to use and appropriate for this project, and how can we get people to submit content? We are yet to work out an answer to the latter question (and it is not yet a priority), but made some significant progress in the software question in Thursday’s class.
The class began with a discussion about the importance of interface in our projects. Hannah reminded us that unlike traditional linear film, the media elements that make up our project are presented in an interface which is equally important as the elements, and has significant gravitas on the user experience. There should be meaning and significance in the interface that relates to the content. The Quipu Project is a great example of how the interface has been designed incredibly well to add meaning and depth to the project, and the media elements within. The interface relates, calls upon and engages with deep historical and cultural traditions of the Peruvian people that the project focuses on. At this point, we were unsure of what our interface would be but knew we would be moving away from Kosakow. In our pitch in week 8, Steph mentioned different software that allowed the author to place videos or media content on a map, creating the interface of a map with clickable content.
The aforementioned importance of the interface supports our decision to create a map-based interface. The map adds another dimension to this project- a new way to think about the content, in a world-wide sense, where bad luck can strike anywhere. We decided to explore this map-based interface possibility. After a lot of frustrating searching, we found that while we had a great idea of what the project could look like, there probably wasn’t an easily accessible software available to do what we wanted. Ideally, we could have both the map system and key word tagging (allowing multiple ways for the user to explore the content), with some kind of automated twitter feed too. We soon realised that any of these elements on their own are hard to find in software, so they would be even harder to find together. Software either required payment, the ability to write code, didn’t offer anything we wanted or were just generally confusing. It was a frustrating process but just as we started to have the feedback session, Antonia found Google My Maps, software that allows people to create customised maps with layers, markers, lines, and embedded media (attached to the markers). The markers can even have different icons- allowing some kind
We soon realised that it was definetely the best option we’d found so far. It works through uploading videos to YouTube and then embedding the video into the software. While it can potentially be editable by anyone (as it is part of the Google suite), we don’t want to open up the backend of the project to the world, and consequently will use a different submitting system.
We received really positive feedback from everyone we talked to, everyone was supportive of the map interface.