1 ‘We’re Happy and We Know It : Documentary: Data: Montage’ Jon Dovey & Mandy Rose Abstract This article is concerned with the social praxis of documentary in the sea of ‘ubiquitous data’ that is both consequence and driver of online social mediation. The topic is given importance by the morphing of the character of video in the context of the latest web coding language, HTML5. Until now web video has been impervious to its networked context; reproducing the conditions of the TV screen in a hypermediated space. Now existing databases and live information drawn from social media can be connected to the documentary environment, offering opportunities for the production of new kinds of knowledge and application. 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. Contributor’s Details Jon Dovey is Professor of Screen Media at the University of the West of England. He is the Director of the Digital Cultures Research Centre (http://www.dcrc.org.uk/). He also heads up REACT, the AHRC Creative Economy Hub for Wales and the West that aims to connect arts research with the Creative Economy. He was a film maker and video artist before becoming an academic. He has been working with Mandy Rose and the iDocs team at DCRC, see more at http://i-docs.org/ . He is the author of Freakshows - First Person Media And Factual TV Pluto Press July 2000 and a co author of New Media 2 - A Critical Introduction Routledge 2002/8. He is also co author of Game Cultures (McGraw Hill 2006) [email protected] Mandy Rose is a Senior Research Fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England. Her practice-based research looks at the intersection between documentary and the social, semantic and open web. Mandy has devised and overseen a number of award-winning interactive and participatory projects. She was co-founder and producer of BBC2's "mass observation" camcorder project - Video Nation (94-2000), Executive Producer of Capture Wales (2001-2007), a pioneering digital storytelling project in the UK. She devised Voices (2004) – a major pan-platform collaborative exploration of language, accent and dialect across the UK (Webby nominated) and MyScienceFictionLife (2006) - a collective history of British science fiction (Webby Honoree). Mandy’s work as a director includes Meeting the Masai Mob (BBC 2, 2001) and the series Pictures in the Post (BBC 2,1999). Mandy blogs at CollabDocs (http://collabdocs.wordpress.com/) and is a contributing editor to the i-Docs website (http://i-docs.org/). [email protected] Keywords Digital, Data, Online, Web, Interactive, Semantic 1 Introduction ‘We believe that humanity is on the verge of a revolution. We’ve moved beyond the web of pages and the Internet of people. Soon, we’ll take ubiquitous data for granted. Our every glance will be augmented; our every purchase shared and analyzed. Big data, available to everyone, in compelling, convincing interfaces will change the very nature of how we 3 think. It will unseat and launch entire industries, hold governments accountable, and empower society. There’s an industrial revolution of data coming. The power of data will change us as surely as the power of steam did a century ago.’ (O’Reilly ‘Strata: Making Data Work Conference’ Feb 1-3 2011) Our opening quotation is the marketing blurb for a 2011 conference aimed at the business and technology community. The aim of the event was to investigate ‘the change brought to technology and business by data science, pervasive computing, and new interfaces.’ In asserting that the ‘power of data will change us as surely as the power of steam did a century ago’ the authors offer us a useful entry point to the historical perspectives that will underpin our analysis. In this article we want to explore what might happen to documentary in the sea of ‘ubiquitous data’ conjured by the marketeers of Web 2.0. Classical documentary might be understood as a product of the ‘age of steam’, a form that evolved from the mechanical optical technologies of the 19th century combined with the operational needs of newly complex industrialized and urbanized societies to create mediated mass communications systems. As one of the innovative miracles of 19th Century technology, photochemical image making and its subsequent mechanical reproduction bought the wonders of the world to an enthusiastic public. As ‘the pencil of nature’ the photographic process was constructed as an indexical means of registering the visual world - its assemblage at once wonder and scientific instrument. The documentary film mission has been to mediate society to itself, to let one part of a society see another, to create a very particular kind of dialogue. In its traditional construction documentary has been understood as part of an electronic public sphere, as a ‘discourse of sobriety’ akin to others, science, the law, education, that shape social reality (Nichols 1991: 3-4). A privileged relationship to social reality is one of the leading ‘claims’ of the traditional discourse of documentary. However documentary film in the twentieth century was as much about changing the world as it was observing it. Nichols sums up this tradition in his well known position that documentary presents us with arguments about our shared world, propositions about the world that are made as part of a process of social praxis. Brian Winston has a similar sense of documentary history, when he writes about documentary finding its place on the ‘battlefields of 4 epistemology’ he captures some of the ways in which documentary film makers and critics argue about the world we share when they argue about its documentary representation. (Winston 1995). Whilst this idea about a ‘documentary tradition’ has been widely critiqued (eg Dovey 2001, Renov 2008, Bruzzi 2000) this article will work within the memory of documentary as social praxis in its attempt to argue for new modalities of coherence within the emergent online environment. We are concerned with the forms of social praxis available for documentary in its emergent online modes. Never has there been more documentary material available to us; the online video world is awash with an impossible excess of documentary fragments. We have dealt elsewhere with the dynamics of collaboration as producers explore forms of co-created documentary production (Dovey & Rose 2012). Others in this Special edition deal with the emergent forms of i-Docs. In this piece we want to think about what happens when documentary imaging occurs within the new data rich contexts referred to in our opening quotation above. With the latest generation of the web coding language HTML5, video is becoming an integrated web technology rather than an add-on requiring a separate player – it is ‘of the web’, rather than ‘on the web’. This allows for a new agility in the way that connections can be made between video and other web information sources. Existing databases and live, up to the moment, information drawn from social media can be connected to the documentary environment. What new possibilities does this unlock for documentary? 2. Footprints in the digital sand Coloured dots dance across a black screen apparently at random. Where the cursor rests, they cluster around it, jostling to get close. The dots are of varying sizes, colours and shapes. From some dots words for feelings appear – ‘disappointed’, ‘sick’, ‘great’, ‘real’. Sometime these are located in place; ‘United States, Oregon, guilty’, ‘Saudi Arabia, Riyadh, Shemaissy/strong’. When you click on a dot a sentence appears in headline on the top of the page, with a curious form of attribution; “I did feel sadness for putting my children through it, from a female, in chester, va united states when it was cloudy.” What are these dots? What’s happening here? 5 This is the first interface you come across in We Feel Fine, ‘an almanac of human emotion’, created by sampling the world’s blogs every few minutes for the words ‘I feel fine’ or ‘I am feeling’. The work, by Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar, made a stir when it was launched in 2005 and soon became an iconic piece. The sentence containing the words is captured, along with information relating to the author. Each dot represents a feeling. The colour, intensity, shape reflecting the feeling’s character, intensity, mood. When the user chooses from a menu of options, the dots / feelings organise themselves into one of a number of ‘playful interfaces’ relating to demographic and contextual information. These ‘movements’ present the data in a variety of ways. The section called Montage, for instance, uses images from blogs ‘to ask what happiness looks like’, Mobs shows the most frequent feelings in a population, and Mounds represents how the feelings look in the whole database. 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. The aesthetic of We Feel Fine combines machine and human in a manner at once witty and empathic. As Maria Popova says in reviewing the We Feel Fine book in 2006; ‘With its unique software-driven model, We Feel Fine is a revelation of emotion through a prism of rational data that only makes the emotional crux deeper and more compelling.’ Jonathan Harris became interested in storytelling through ‘the partial glimpse into somebody’s life’ that he saw in personal fragments, the scraps of presence left by our online behaviours (Harris 2007).