iDocs 2012 day 1 PM : thoughts

I spent Day 1 afternoon in the Feedback session for '18 days in Egypt' led for Jigar Mehta, whose frustration was palpable. It's clear that he feels a great sense of responsibility regarding achieving a completeness of the story-- gathering as many as possible and putting them together but also frustration of wanting to do something/ being expected to do something really cool with the material.

'18 days' represents every truly journalistic challenge and promise of a more traditionally journalistic idoc*: temporal to archival possibilities and aspects of following an issue over the arc of one's career, utilising on the ground resources to tummel the situation as it emerges, to relational aspects of the broader world.

I don't envy Mr Mehta his task. Indeed his frustration with trying to figure out what to do next -- even if it completes (what's the exit strategy-- represents the challenge of entrepreneurial journalism less in monetisation but more in 'entrepreneurial' planning. Mehta himself commented that His project is more of a lean startup than an idoc at times.

Several things struck me, these might be inaccurate or ridiculous but I'm going to throw them out there:

First, there seemed to be an odd consensus that '18 days' need to be "cleaned up" into some kin of consolidated narrative organisation. The opposite occurs to me for the simple fact that the nature of revolutions are messy and cobbled together -- why are we looking for something that's 'neat' in nature? To say nothing of the fact that anyone who has ever lived in an Arabic culture for even a little while quickly learns 'what is, is not' (this was told to me in Jordan, the phrase phonetically 'mish-mush-key-la').

Mehta feels a pressure to tie people's stories together, to make a beautifully complexity of the events. He is thinking of all the rich possibilities we are presented with but I wonder-- and frequently so in my plans for my own project-- if just because we have the capability to link data together in all these really cool ways if perhaps we should at all?

Earlier in the day Brian Winston's presentation of interactivity in analogue interactive documentary** struck me in its simplicity, in the simplicity of the human connection that without the flashy media and digital data augmentation I felt so much more emotion in the experience! And indeed, one of Mehta's 3 challenges as he presented to us is how to make more of an emotional connection with the material; he thinks this will be done in 'cleaning up' the site but I'm not certain this will be achieved if it's done by features. We face the danger as an idoc community of getting lost in features and flashy media.

Mehta wants to be able to 'complete' the story of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, to make links between people's stories so that we have a 'complete' view. This sounds great, on its face, and in theory all the data out there and all the data that the '18 days' site is collecting should make this possible? But are we complicating the story in making it 'complete'? And by complicating, I mean making it so complete that we work the emotional connection out of it by not allowing room for imagination -- the point at which our own narrative entry and thus connection is made.

I might be completely off base but I think it's worth thinking about. It's that construction that happens with blank space in a story that allows us to connect sometimes. Can it be over-done, even in the interests of journalistic accuracy?

The wisest words ever spoken to me about storytelling were from my college freshman english professor, herself a former journalist: 'show, don't tell the story.'

Further reading:

Turner, M. (1998)

Wright, A. (2007)

Schwartz, P. (1991)

Wolf, M. (2010)

*I'm not entirely certain what I mean by this, but probably something along the lines of the spectrum of interactive documentary which includes art-docs and docutheatre.

**Winston presented old material of mining strikes in the US and talked about how those films made their way to Wales, where both communities began dialoguing with each other and the topic, to emerge a more complete understanding of their places within the larger story of the evolution of the mining industry.

Digital Storytelling discussion on Facebook

I'm part of a group on Facebook begun by the Centre for Digital Storytelling to discuss issues in digital storytelling under the CDS paradigm. Digital storytelling as a field isn't exactly documentary, but isn't exactly different either.

Recently we had an interesting discussion on journalists as digital storytellers that is incredibly useful for figuring out what we as journalist-idocumentariennes should be doing.

(republished with permission of everyone in discussion)

Care to add anything? Please leave a comment.

Conversations with Curators_1

This post is a follow up to a previous one in which I rant that I think ‘journalism’ is miss-firing when declaring that the future of news is curation. 

I’ve recently finished Steve Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation and was going to begin my lit review of it and rant that he conflates tummeling and conversation into curation. Before I did that I figured that I’d better know what I’m talking about, that is, I better make sure I know what is meant by curation and moreover, what is meant when journalists say (collectively) ‘we should be curators.’ If I’m going to rant, I might as well be right, no?

So I’ve decided to interview some curators (and since I am in Berlin, what better place?); I had the first of these chats last the week before last with Perla Montelongo From the Node Centre for Curatorial Studies. What I learned is that what I think curators do, what journalism translates from the notion of ‘curator’ and what curation is traditionally and in modernity are different things. My rant to Rosenbaum isn’t entirely misplaced, but it’s not entirely right either.

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Lambert (2002) Digital Storytelling

Lambert, J, (2002). Digital Storytelling: capturing lives, creating community. 3^rd Ed. 2009. Digital Diner Press: Berkeley. 

This book is one of the core texts in the study of interactive digital storytelling. It appears frequently as reference in not only the conference proceedings from ICIDS (which I will draw heavily on) to Lundby (2009) to mainstream marketed books (Shirky, Pink). This is not written as an academic text but a practitioner’s best practice guide. The plain language matches the simplicity of the conclusions. I want to use this book as one of two cores of my PhD— where the core is the role of the interactive documentarienne. 

Main points

Stories(tellers) need facilitators.

“We do not pretend, at the Center for Digital Storytelling, to have license to function as therapeutic facilitators…. But it would be inconceivable, incomprehensible, and irresponsible if we did not recognise the emotional and spiritual consequence of this work.” Lambert (2002)

This single quotation sums the purpose and the limitations of this text (Center for Digital Storytelling’s ideology?). (more on the limitations below)

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Realise & Repeat: Objective Reporting Doesn't Exist

Usually I love @duckrabbitblog but I want to take issue with a post from earlier in the week: “Getty Grants for a Good Laugh”. The post thrashes a Getty grant winning project called “This is Africa” and work by photographer Sarah Elliot for not being truthful and sites cinema vérité as the theoretical background for doing so. This is something I feel very strongly about because it’s unhelpful (and even irresponsible) today to continue to purport that there is such a thing as objective journalism or purely factual reporting; there’s no such thing.

Here is an excerbt that shows the confused form of the discussion:

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I know that and you know that, but do they know that?

Probably the most oft quoted bit of Stella Bruzzi's foundation text New Documentary is "that a documentary is a negotiation between reality on the one hand and image, interpretation and bias on the other."

In other words, the truth of the events are made in the processes of filming. Bruzzi's entire book is devoted to tearing down the myth of objectivity in documentary.

Citation: Bruzzi, S. (2000). New Documentary. 3rd Ed. Kindle. Routledge: London.

It's not the accuracy of her thesis that I wish to take issue with. Filmmakers, journalists, probably amateur (in the hobbyist sense) filmmakers realise this. There's something innate about the act of cutting video that brings you to this realisation: objective truth in documentary doesn't exist (nor does it in journalism). The film you watch is everything to do with the camera man, the editor, etc.'s biases.

There's something implicit in Bruzzi's message that it's intended to be communicated to those engaged in documentary discourse-- in the documentary community. What bothers me is that she's preaching to the choir, probably a choir that's already got her point.

Most people (outside that community), I suspect, see a documentary and expect that it is objective, that it conveys truth. Yes, we as humans have a tendency to internalise stories, they become our 'truth' in the end, but that aside, Bruzzi wants to change the perceptions of what a documentary film is, as it is perceived as 'truth' but she fails to address the public. The public's perceptions of documentary style film is what counts. It's the average "Bob and Sally" that I'm worried about.

***

An interesting after thought to this is: when people see a YouTube based videoblog, what's their perception of the objective truth of it? Does it depend on the subject, the style of video?

Would love some comments.

Interactive Storytelling Versus Interactive Documentary

In the context of journalism, if:

documentary * f (journalism) = journalism * [ f (storytelling) + f (social media) ]

What does interactive mean?

Does documentary have to (continue) to be mostly made up of moving images?

Reflections On Studying Ethnography_I : Reflexivity

I’m studying ethnography as part of my PhD but also because I think it’ll make me a better storyteller because essentially, I tell other people’s stories. Surely journalism is a kind of practical, daily ethnography?

My first ethnography book is one that is recently published, short in length, and I’d assume, written in relaxed language for students unfamiliar with ethnography. The author himself describes the purpose of the text to be for an introductory postgraduate level. 

Citation: Madden, R. (2010). Being Ethnographic. Sage: London.

I’m only on the third chapter but my mind is already very buzzy with my own first experiences at DIY journalism that I wanted to empty it. The first section of the text addresses reflexivity and subjectivity versus objectivity in research. Madden talks about entering a ‘foreign’ community to conduct his very first ethnographic field study: the aboriginal community in his home town. 

I immediately began relating his experiences and the principles he discusses (there’s that storytelling, cognitive relativity thing) to my own experience whilst writing a piece on the “Man Collective” (now defunct, as was). 

The situation: a “gathering” of men talking about being men in the world today. 

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