Interactive Documentary and Non-Fiction Media: Relational Practice and (De)Stabilized Reception (Media Studies)

Interactive documentaries combine moving images, text, graphics, and digital interactions to create dynamic, web-based narrative formats. As a post-cinematographic expansion of the classical documentary film, they provide viewers with opportunities to select options and make decisions that co-determine what is shown and in what order. This volume brings together perspectives from film, media, game, and interface studies and includes analyses of key works as well as interviews with actors involved in making interactive documentaries. Key topics explored include opportunities for participating in interactive formats, challenges for the long-term archiving and accessibility of browser-based documentaries, and the influence of software and interfaces on the concept of the documentary.

Tobias Conradi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media. He leads the project “Played Problems – ‘Decisions’ as a Category of Knowledge”, which investigates the use of serious games as educational media, especially in the context of promoting awareness and mindfulness regarding “fake news” and climate change. His research focuses on discourse theory and analysis, narratives of reality, politics of representation, and the relationship between crisis, critique, and decision.

Florian Krautkrämer (Prof. Dr.) unterrichtet Film- und Medientheorie und -geschichte an der Hochschule Luzern.

Vanessa Zallot is a doctoral student at the Department of Media Studies at Universität Basel working on her dissertation on knowledge-making and documentary strategies in interactive documentaries. Her research merges interests from media studies and European ethnology encompassing documentary theory, digital platforms, and production practices as well as ethnographic methodologies, media and digital anthropology, visual ethnography, and queer methodologies.