Database Narratives, Possibility Spaces: Shape-shifting and interactivity in digital documentary (original) (raw)

DigiMag Journal, Issue 73, November 2012, the digicult's project journal ISSN:2037-2256 pp.77-92

"Working digitally allows the ‘conventional’ documentary narrative form to shift from temporal to spatial, from horizontal to vertical, from sequential to concurrent. Digitality also provides interactivity. With interactivity comes a potentially spontaneous, engaged and active audience able to choose how they receive the content. Yet, documentaries need to convey critical pieces of their narrative for their story to be comprehensible to their audience. The critical question for documentary makers, then, is how to incorporate these new digital technologies, with their potential for innovative narrative structures, and still make a factual story understandable to their audience. Identifying the Internet as the primary site that has opened up space for digital storytelling Lundby (2008, 3) says" "(The Internet) offered new options to share the ‘classical’ small-scale stories created in story circles at various corners of the globe. The World Wide Web also gave rise to new forms, Blogging, in text only or with video, as well as the social networking sites on the web offer new opportunities to share short personal stories". Examples of these online story spaces will be explored in this paper, along with early televisional forms, computer specific forms, gallery specific forms and performative forms. This selection of work illustrates the experimentation with digital form that Manovich in The Language of New Media (2001) terms ‘database narrative’ and Hayles (2005, 1-35) calls ‘possibility space’. Both terms help to define the territory in which the form of documentary is shape-shifting as a result of the revolution in digital technology."