DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

The week ending the 9th of December saw research engagements near and far, brought renewed discussions of the work of Bernard Stiegler, and launched the first ideas lab for the REACT hub, in Exeter.

DCRC Director Jonathan Dovey recently returned from New Zealand where, during the week, he presented a keynote at the Expanding Documentary conference, which happened at Aukland University of Technology. Jon's paper, building from his work with Mandy Rose, addressed some of the potentials and pitfalls of the current new wave of collaborative and interactive documentaries online. Jon has just posted some reflections on his visit here on the blog.

Mandy Rose reflected on her own presentation of her work concerning collaborative documentary in a fantastic recent blog post. Mandy outlines an emerging typology of four modes of collaborative documentary production:

• "The Creative Crowd" model functions as multiple participants contribute fragments to a highly templated whole, analogous to the separate panels within a quilt.
• "The Participant Observers" are distributed filmmakers who each contribute to a work that’s concerned with contrasting experiences of place.
• "The Community of Purpose” is a group of participants that take part in a production with a shared objective around social change.
• "The Traces of the Multitude" describes a new aspect to collaboration by drawing on social media content – linking to a multitude of, potentially anonymous, contributors.

Please do read Mandy's post, which is full of examples of each of these modes of collaborative documentary as well as Mandy's expert commentary.

Tom Abba's ongoing research concerning the evolution of storytelling and its implications for publishing has recently been spotlighted by Media Futures in their report concerning the 'Future of Publishing' and in their recent event at Watershed, "Publish!".

DCRC researchers convened to talk through our collective recent engagements with the work of the philosopher Bernard Stiegler. We hope to announce some interesting related activities in 2012, more will be posted to this blog in the near future.

The REACT knowledge exchange hub, led by Jonathan Dovey, conducted the first ideas lab in Exeter for the 'Heritage' themed sandbox. This is the first of the knowledge exchange sandbox programmes that will be run through REACT between 2011 and 2014.