Interactive Documentary: A Production Model for Nonfiction Multimedia Narratives

This paper presents an interactive production model for nonfiction multimedia, referred to as interactive documentary. We discuss the design of ontologies for authoring interactive documentary. A working prototype supports the use of reasoning for retrieving, composing, and displaying media resources in real-time. A GUI is designed to facilitate concept-based navigation which enables queries across media resources of diverse types. A dual-root-node data design links ontological reasoning with metadata, which provides a method for defining hybrid semantic-quantitative relationships. Our application focuses on archiving and retrieving non-text based media resources. The system architecture supports sensory-rich display feedback with real time interactivity for navigating documents’ space. We argue an experience of narratives evolves through the performitivity in the interactive narrative structure when the constituents are mediated by common ontology. The consequential experience identifies a renewed practice of oral tradition where the accumulative sensorial propositions inform narratives, such as in performance practice.