This weeks reading focuses on discussion around documentary, data and the effect of the internet on such things in todays day ‘n’ age. It also talks a lot about the project film: We Feel Line. ‘Still live, We Feel Fine still impresses for its innovation and for its realisation, bringing computer science, data visualisation and storytelling to bear on content that is unlocked by tapping into the common metadata structure of blogs.’
As usual, here are some quotes and notes I took from the reading:
‘The affordances of networked connectivity offer the potential to re-contextualise documentary material through mobilising the enormous co-creative potential of human discourse captured in the web. The challenge in these marriages of mass media form and rhizomatic network is to find new ways of shaping attention into a coherent experience. To do so we have to re-invent the social praxis of documentary, creating new visual and informational grammars.’
‘In 1926 John Grierson defined documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. In using the term ‘actuality’ he was referring to a specific form; the newsreels – short film observations of topical events – that were shown alongside features in cinemas then. The snatches of self-expression which are Harris’s raw material, can be seen as ‘actualities’ of the Information Age, units of content reflecting the world which can, with a creative treatment, be fashioned into a documentary artefact.’
‘Documentary presents us with arguments about our shared world, propositions about the world that are made as part of a process of social praxis. ‘ – Nichols
‘Video content ‘of the web’, live to the affordances of networked connectivity, has particular attractions to the documentary producer. It has the potential to introduce different voices into a linear text, to offer in-depth investigation of particular sequences, and to re-contextualise documentary material through mobilising the enormous co-creative potential of human discourse captured in the web. It offers the potential for new ways to construct argument and bring evidence to bear in documentary’s attempt to shape our shared world.’