Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2020

The movement of people across different countries has been a constant in the history of human civilization. This has been attested to by the so-called ‘mobility turn’ in the social sciences. One of the most important recent instances of such a movement has been the mass migration of diverse communities to the United States. This migratory transit has been portrayed in numerous ways in different media. Among these, documentary films have played a crucial role in their approach to these migrant flows. In both, traditional forms and new web platforms, we find multiple examples of non-fiction that focus on portraying these communities. This article focuses on one of these platforms: Immigrant Nation Media. By highlighting the resistance practices the platform offers, this analysis focuses on its collaborative and educational dimensions, as well as its dedication to migrant empowerment.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are key elements in the educational process of teens. Consequently, efforts should be made to integrate ICT into educational plans and policies. Based on this premise, HEBE has been launched – a study on youth empowerment that was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and carried out by five universities: the University of Girona, the Autonomous University of Madrid, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the University of Barcelona and Pompeu Fabra University. The project, based on media literacy and transmedia skills, involves the creation of an interactive documentary (i-doc). The HEBE i-doc: digital prints relates the experiences and reflections during the maturation stage of six youngsters with different cultural, educational, family and social backgrounds and profiles. This exploration was carried out through their own audio-visual creations, in a life story format. The i-doc has the dual purpose of (1) devising a methodology based on digital ethnography, and (2) creating an interactive platform for sharing experiences and promoting the visibility of these issues via citizen science.

Educational and cultural television is an audio-visual medium that seeks to bear an impact on the knowledge, the attitudes and the values of an audience. This text introduces the CREA TV platform as an informal educational and socializing audio-visual instrument and describes the development of the documentary Miguel Hernández 360° made in 360° video. Two objectives are pursued through this: first, to introduce 360° video production as a means to use format to engage the audience and to foster the assimilation of contents; on the other hand, to teach values. To identify its effects, this experience was tested with secondary school students. The results of the analysis suggest that this 360° video has an impact on the connection between the viewer and the story due to its immersive character and sense of presence during the viewing of the documentary, as well as on the understanding and assimilation of the information it contains.

Virtual reality and 360° video are some of the latest technological developments within the media and communications industry. These technologies, which are designed to facilitate viewer immersion, are currently being used to create fictional and non-fictional content, thus giving rise to a new audio-visual narrative. On the basis of these premises, this research article analyses how immersive narratives are applied to the social documentary genre in its social dimension. To this end, qualitative content analysis was performed on a sample of 49 immersive documentaries published on the WITHIN platform. This analysis, which was completed with quantitative data, allowed us to confirm that these technologies have enabled the development of immersive narratives, which has given birth to a new type of documentary – the ‘immersive social documentary’.

The main objective of this research is to explore how i-docs motivate and drive citizen engagement in a manner that sustains and reinforces the sense of belonging to the feminist movement. Drawing upon the eight core drives represented by each side of the Octalysis methodology, the purpose of this study is to identify the motivational elements that push citizens to participate in feminist causes and to be concerned about different feminist issues. Using a quantitative methodology, our sample comprises three feminist documentaries that enable different levels of interaction and participation: She Is Beautiful When She Is Angry, as a closed i-doc; En la brecha, as a semi-closed i-doc; and Las sinsombrero, as a semi-open i-doc. The results show that the most powerful motivational element in the three i-docs is the ‘epic meaning and calling’ core drive.

Interactive documentaries have been growing in number and importance on the international scene in numerous fields and markets. Interactive documentaries entered the field of health about a decade ago, and since then they have proven to be a worthwhile tool for exploring various health issues, such as living with HIV. More recently, experts and academics have started to explore interactive documentaries dealing with a newly emerging topic – stigma. Stigma has negative consequences in every aspect of a person’s life. When it comes to health, people with stigmatized conditions have the worst outcomes, a problem ultimately related to their own power and agency. The media and culture are two structural sources of stigmatization, and cultural trauma has been suggested as one of its mediators. This study seeks to examine interactive documentaries as a tool for raising awareness of the impact of HIV-related stigma and cultural trauma. To this end, it analyses two interactive documentaries, Vertical/Horizontal and The Graying of AIDS, focusing on the device, narrative and textual elements used by these documentaries to deal with the impact of stigma in health, and elaborating on how these cultural productions represent people living with stigma and whether that representation challenges or reinforces stigmatization.

The evolutionary trajectory of digital journalism has been fuelled by the convergence of visual storytelling unique to documentary filmmaking with the graphics and procedural rhetoric of digital games. The reciprocal influences between gaming and documentary forms coalesce in this new highly engaging interactive journalism. This research demonstrates how game mechanics, design and logics combine with cinematic storytelling conventions in documentary games published since 2014. As forms of civic engagement more intimate and immersive than traditional print and broadcast journalism, documentary games leverage alternative depictions of violence for social critique. Case studies examine products of independent developers including the documentary games We Are Chicago by Culture Shock Games and iNK Stories’ 1979 Revolution: Black Friday along with its related vérité virtual reality experience, Blindfold. These cases represent major advances in the activist depiction of oppressed populations in narrative documentary journalism. All these projects feature atypical video game protagonists anathema to those of mainstream games.

This article explores the intersections between interactive documentary and digital rights, across notions of surveillance, privacy and data. The collection of personal and sensitive data online increases exponentially, and individuals become a series of data points, only of relevance insofar as we are part of a larger group marked by similar characteristics. Yet somewhat contradictorily, we are also scrutinized completely. How might creative media production bridge this gap – recognizing our individual complexity while respecting rights to privacy? Documentary media offers one response – individual stories and voices can serve to flesh out a complex story while retaining links to a broader narrative. Interactive documentary, furthermore, can offer a reflexive form of storytelling that uses the very forms of technology in question to highlight the potential problems. This article presents case studies of interactive documentaries, exploring how the strategies of reflexivity and responsiveness can engender an understanding of issues of digital rights.

Hybridization permeates all fields of communication: documentaries are no exception. One example is The Left-to-Die Boat by Forensic Architecture (FA), an audio-visual account of how 63 refugees lost their lives in 2011 when their ship was adrift in the waters of Libya. The Left-to-Die Boat combines documentary techniques with data analysis and visualizations to expose a tragedy, change migration policies and sustain court cases. Based on critical data and documentary studies, this article inspects the methodological hybridization proposed by FA in six documentaries. The questions are: how does FA hybridize? What are the outcomes of this hybridization? What is hybridization today? The analysis links these documentaries’ characteristics with functions and outcomes, offering a taxonomy that can be employed beyond this study. The findings indicate that activism is taking multidimensional forms, blurring the boundaries separating documentaries, data science and art in search of impact.