2016 | 10 | Non-fiction Transmedia

Interactive digital media have greatly affected the logics of production, exhibition and reception of non-fiction audiovisual works, leading to the emergence of a new area called “interactive and transmedia non-fiction”. One of its key points is that it can deal with factual material in such a way that it influences and transforms the real world around us. With this issue we aim to offer a scholarly perspective on the emergence of transmedia forms, their technological and aesthetic characteristics, the types of audience engagement they engender, the possibilities they create for engagement with archival content, the technological predecessors that they may or may not have emerged from, and the institutional and creative milieux in which they thrive.
Co-edited by Arnau Gifreu-Castells, Richard Misek and Erwin Verbruggen

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10

A Transmedia Topology of Making a Murderer
Hook, Alan; Barrios-O'Neill, Danielle; Mairs Dyer, Jolene (2016-12-31)
This article constructs a transmedia topology of the Making a Murderer text, mapping the ecologies of interaction, participation and creation with and of the text by the audience. Firstly we explore the mixed textualities of the series delivered through the streaming service Netflix. We then expand the analysis to consider the wider transmedial textualities and trace the thresholds of the transmedial text to investigate new approaches to analysing transmedial work in the context of non-fiction media forms. We explore the relationships between the core series and the participatory engagement in the production of the text as a whole which includes online engagement, active investigations, and the production of a wide range of new material in response to the core series. Here we define transmedia topology as a tracing of what we could call the geography of the text, as defined by its features and boundaries (or lack thereof).We situate the series as a piece of Complex TV, but explore how the series invites active participation from the audience; through its structure, complexity and form. The article maps the series textual connections with more traditional documentary form, and more experimental transmedial approaches, relating it to Alternate Reality Games. We consider (at the time of writing and publication) the tangible, real world outcomes of the text and the audiences participation in the production of the text. This mapping situates the text within a number of media discourses to understand its media geneology and explore its textual trajectories.This mapping explores both the 10-part series, and the wealth of paratextual material as a text together, mapping the connections between the documentary series and the emergence of a transmedial textuality that is owed largely to audiences and the textual terrain.
Aligning Participation with Authorship: Independent Transmedia Documentary Production in Norway
Karlsen, Joakim (2016-12-31)
Incentives to develop non-fiction transmedia projects have recently challenged the work practices of independent documentary filmmakers in Norway. However, research on documentary films has only minimally captured the emerging practice of making non-fiction transmedia. Based on an interview study undertaken in 2012/2013 and reflections on contributing to a recent non-fiction transmedia project, I find that the emerging practice faces many of the same challenges as the participative documentary practice of the 1970s, mainly that the facilitation of audience participation requires a break from the broadcasting logic of independent documentary film work.
Crossroads: Life Changing Stories from the Second World War: A (Transmedia) Storytelling Approach to World War II Heritage
Calvi, Licia; Hover, Moniek (2016-12-31)
Crossroads is the name of the concept that narratively connects several WWII-related cultural institutions in Brabant. It is an overarching paradigm that links together four otherwise very diverse World War II sites, namely, three museums and a commemoration centre.Crossroads provides these institutions with a tool in the form of a three-layered matrix to build and offer visitors a cohesive experience related to their WWII heritage. This experience is characterised by the specific approach that they can adopt in telling their WWII stories. This approach uses storytelling techniques. This is what the Crossroads matrix is about.This paper will highlight the creative process that led to the development of this concept and will discuss examples of the resulting non-fiction (transmedia) narratives.
Emergent Principles for Digital Documentary
Lachman, Richard (2016-12-31)
Digital Documentaries are an area of rapid invention and experimentation at all levels, including creative content, production techniques, and business models. As with many forms of digital storytelling, a focus on technologies can be distracting; platforms change rapidly, and are dependent on external commercial forces rather than creative potential. This article presents several design strategies for driving experimentation in digital documentary above and beyond the specific of platform and technology. The core focus is on treating digital docs as experiences, with an expanded range of designable moments, as well as a strategic approach to designing interactions for their unique set of challenges. The discussion is not intended to fully define digital documentary design factors, but rather, defines a useful subset of methods that can lead emerging practitioners to new innovations in their approach.
Interactive Graphic Journalism
Schlichting, Laura (2016-12-31)
This paper aims at briefly explaining graphic journalism and distinguishing it from comics journalism, as well as approaching graphic journalism via looking at the concept of interactivity. The second part discusses the case studies of The Nisoor Square Shooting (2010) and Ferguson Firsthand (2015) created by Dan Archer. It analyses and interprets how the two pieces of graphic journalism create new ways of storytelling, what their innovative elements are, to what extent interactivity occurs and which functions it fulfils.
I’m Sorry I Don’t Have a Story: An Essay Involving Interactive Documentary, Bristol and Hypertext
Miles, Adrian (2016-12-31)
This essay provides an introductory analysis of Alisa Lebow’s interactive documentary Filming Revolution. It approaches the work from the point of view of new media, rather than documentary, arguing that the work adopts an important non–narrative form as a way to describe revolution, and to prevent the foreclosure that story enforces. This essay is experimental to the extent that it tries (with mixed fortune) to introduce the essayistic into scholarly writing, and, perhaps, tries to find room for some of the qualities of the essay film in a personal academic practice.
Korsakow Perspective(s): Rethinking Documentary Knowledge in Digital Multilinear Environments
Weidle, Franziska (2016-12-31)
In linear documentary land, we are trained to see stories everywhere we look. Digital media and its materially distinct characteristics encourage reflections on this particular schooling and the power relations it is embedded in. As a result, many artists, filmmakers and scholars advocate interactivity as presumably more ‘authentic’ organizing principle for representing realty. While linear storytelling still prevails as framework for a majority of these interactive works, the documentary apprenticeship observed at the non/fictionLab offers an example for exploring digital materiality beyond the narrative paradigm. Drawing on my ethnographic study of a small group of research-practitioners, this paper analyses media software as part of an emerging counterpractice that challenges story as primary organizing principle and facilitates further investigation of digital environments for the making of documentary.
Small Change – Big Difference: Tracking the Transmediality of Red Nose Day
Freeman, Matthew (2016-12-31)
This article analyses transmedia as a non-fictional social phenomenon, discussing the significance of participation, documentary, and community media. Specifically, the article conceptualises transmedia through the lens of charity politics. To do so, I use the Comic Relief charity campaign in the UK to trace how the social traditions, ways of life and sensibilities associated with Red Nose Day have evolved into emerging digital technologies to shape this charity campaign across the borders of multiple media platforms. Embracing how social specificity informs non-fictional transmedia, I position ‘infotainment’ as a key conceptual logic of nonfictional transmedia, showing how audiences follow the ‘ethos’ of Red Nose Day across multiple media.
Story, History and Intercultural Memory: Can a Transmedia Approach Benefit an Archive-Based Documentary Project?
Di Crosta, Marida; Leandro, Anita (2016-12-31)
The transmedia approach to archive images in contemporary space invites spectators to effectively interfere in the historical narrative—as a real-time scriptwriter and editor. In this article we introduce a transmedia documentary project, História(s) do Brasil (Anita Leandro and Marida Di Crosta). In so doing, we revisit and expand an unfinished pedagogical project by 1970s filmmaker Glauber Rocha. Based on the analysis of current experiences like the European interactive cross-media documentaries like Farewell Comrades!, our study focus on how transmedia can benefit an intercultural television tie-in archive-based documentary.
Transgressing the Non-fiction Transmedia Narrative
Gifreu-Castells, Arnau; Misek, Richard; Verbruggen, Erwin (2016-12-31)
Over the last years, interactive digital media have greatly affected the logics of production, exhibition and reception of non-fiction audiovisual works, leading to the emergence of a new area called ‘interactive and transmedia non-fiction’. While the audiovisual non-fiction field has been partially studied, a few years ago emerged a new field focusing on interactive and transmedia non-fiction narratives, an unexplored territory that needs new theories and taxonomies to differentiate from its audiovisual counterpart.

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