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.