DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

What does the collaborative potential of Web 2.0 mean for documentary? What new forms are emerging as the "people formerly known as the audience" become co-creators on the web? These are the questions which inform the CollabDocs project - an AHRC funded practice-based Research Fellowship in Creative and Performing Arts. The project involves a number of hands-on experiments in collaborative online documentary, looking at how a producer can be a catalyst,  curator, facilitator, in that process.

The project draws inspiration from examples of collaborative creativity in documentary and beyond. The term 'Collab' was used by You Tubers to refer to the joint productions that people started creating on that platform in 1997. 

The research is reflected on the CollabDocs blog where Mandy is also building an archive of interviews with leading practitioners in the field from You Tube Collab pioneer MadV to 2011 Emmy Interactive award winner, Kat Cizek.

Please visit: http://collabdocs.wordpress.com/

Autumn 2011 update

Mandy Rose's current practice-based research The Are you happy? Project revisits Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s seminal 1960 documentary “Chronicle of a Summer” fifty years after it was made, reframing it in the context of global collaboration and the web. Within this work-in-progress, filmmakers and documentary enthusiasts in fifteen countries have responded to an invitation to restage or reinterpret the vox pops sequence that starts that film. You can see their submissions on the Vimeo group and in the project gallery.

In the next phase of the project Mandy is exploring documentary montage in the context of the semantic web, by juxtaposing these recordings with other web content including feeds updating in real-time. The work takes advantage of HTML5, the latest version of the hypertext coding language, which allows links to be made between video and other web content.

The project asks how the work of documentary in making meaning can be negotiated in this new context. How might video and other elements be choreographed to play alongside each other in an elegant, digestible form? What does it mean to the viewer/user to engage with an open-ended experience which evolves hour to hour, day to day – by drawing on live data and drawing in user contribution? The project updates Grierson’s 1926 definition of documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality” in the context of live data and the networked environment.

Mandy will be working with the Popcorn Maker, Mozilla’s open- source authoring tool, released November 2011.

In addition to the everyday dissemination represented by the CollabDocs blog, the research questions have informed a chapter on Online Documentary, co-authored with Professor Jon Dovey, for the forthcoming BFI Companion to Documentary, edited by Brian Winston. The Fellow, Mandy Rose, has also presented her research in contexts including UnionDocs - Brooklyn, NY, at the DIY Citizenship: Critical Making & Social Media Conference, University of Toronto, at i-Docs, Bristol, and at Transforming Audiences 3, London.

Autumn 2010 update

Following a participatory brand design experiment in early 2010, and the production of video content with which to ‘seed’ the project, December 2010 sees the launch of the "Are you happy?" project website: theareyouhappyproject.org. Vimeo also provides a platform through which to draw in contemporary responses to the question originally posed by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in the ground-breaking documentary Chronicle of a Summer half a century ago.

Meanwhile, developments in online architecture are throwing up new questions for the CollabDocs project. The "Are you happy” Project website includes feeds from Flickr and Twitter which offer a live snapshot of happiness. This approach has been elaborated in Autumn 2010 for a proposal to the AHRC which asks how data available online might be creatively combined with “vernacular video” so that the subjective (specific) is effectively contrasted with wider data (the general)?

The proposed Works explore the potential for documentary when similar elements are drawn together on the web through tagging. The projects ask how the work of documentary in making meaning can be negotiated in this new context. How might video and other elements be choreographed to play alongside each other in an elegant, digestible form? What does it mean to the viewer/user to engage with an open-ended experience which evolves hour to hour, day to day – by drawing on live data and drawing in user contribution? These projects therefore pursue the original research questions but in the context of the emerging “Semantic Web” also known as “Web 3.0”.

In addition to the everyday dissemination represented by the CollabDocs blog, the research questions have informed a chapter on Online Documentary, co-authored with Professor Jon Dovey, for the forthcoming BFI Companion to Documentary, edited by Brian Winston. The Fellow, Mandy Rose, has also presented her research in Autumn 2010 at UnionDocs - Brooklyn, NY and at the DIYCitizenship: Critical Making & Social Media Conference, University of Toronto.