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Collabdocs Blog

Launched in June 2009 the CollabDocs blog comprises one of the outputs of Rose’s AHRC Research Fellowship in Creative and Performing Arts. Drawing on Documentary Studies and New Media Theory, the blog reflects Rose’s research into new online interactive and participatory documentary and the broader impacts of connectivity on the documentary environment. Rose’s observation and analysis of the fast-evolving field is grounded in her own current and past practice-based work. The research base also consists of the body of interviews Rose has conducted with leading practitioners in the field, published in full on the CollabDocs platform.

The central research insight which frames the blog is that the impact of digital for documentary is not only expressed at the level of form. The social, semantic and open web are between them producing an environment in which funding, form, process, authorship and distribution are all reworked, towards a new ecology of documentary practice. This central finding, applied with reference to Lev Manovich’s theory of digital transformation, finds expression in posts including “On Crowdfunding” (March 2012), and “Now the Field is Open” (Sept 2012).

Manovich and Henry Jenkins have both observed the tendency within digital culture for marginal twentieth-century cultural forms to be reinvented. Rose’s second key insight concerns the contemporary re-emergence and transformation of forms of community media and participatory art. Posts exploring this theme include “A Filmmaker-in-Residence” (April 2011) and “American Futures” (August 2013).

In this new environment Rose defines new forms of documentary in terms of emergent practices of co-creativity - “The Umbrella of Crowd-Sourcing” (Sept 2011), “Cloud Filmmaking” (Nov 2012) - in which an evolving participatory process takes precedent over a documentary product. The latter theme is addressed in posts including “An Interview with David Evan Harris” (Sept 2011) and “The Awra Amba Experience”(March 2013).