Strategies of Participation: the Who, What and When of Collaborative Documentaries
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- q2857
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.1057/9781137310491_9
- Book title
- New Documentary Ecologies, Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- ISBN
- 9781349456666
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Published within the context of one of the first books on interactive documentary practices, New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses (Palgrave, 2014), this chapter offers a novel methodology to frame and understand the consequences of collaboration in participatory digital documentaries.
The field of digital interactive narratives is relatively new, and has emerged in parallel with the growth of the Web 2.0 and social media. These platforms afford collaboration and User Generated Content (UGC) and therefore it has been assumed that if people send content to a factual website then the result is a collaborative documentary. This chapter critically challenges this simplistic assumption that “participation” is equal to User Generated Content (UGC). It starts by questioning what UGC is, where the term comes from, and what the implications are of such forms of collaboration in the context of interactive documentary praxis. It claims that UGC is just one way to participate in an interactive documentary, and that a variety of other options are possible. The chapter suggests a methodology to analyse strategies of collaboration through three main questions: Who is invited to collaborate? When is this collaboration happening? And what is the participant allowed/empowered to do? The approach is therefore innovative in emphasising the existence of different levels of participation, naming them, and proposing simple questions to frame the analysis of collaborative documentaries.
The chapter has been widely cited, including by; Professor Liz Miller, Concordia University, in her paper Choreographies of Collaboration: Social Engagement in Interactive Documentaries (2016, Studies in Documentary Film), by Dr Adrian Miles, RMIT University, in his paper Matters of Concern and Interactive Documentary: Notes for a Computational Nonfiction (2017, Studies in Documentary Film) and by Dr Anna Wiehl, Bayreuth University, in her recent book The New Documentary Nexus (2019, Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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