Unlock the doc! i-docs and networks of inquiry

This dissertation and project analyse the ongoing crisis in news journalism and evidence-based inquiries. Through practice-led research, the completed prototype Labyrinths & Leaks examines methods for overlapping evidence through the interactive documentary (i-doc) form. This i-doc prototype explores ‘false flags’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2017) that arose through its predecessor Breaking the News (2011), my linear documentary about the Timor-Leste crisis of 2006–2008. I take these misrepresentations as limitations of news media and a sign to address evidentiary accounts through the documentary form.

Indeterminacy is both an affordance and limitation of i-docs. Unbounded by space and time, i-docs offer a holding state for cultural analysis, inquiry into evidence and, through various exchanges, a site for possible reconciliations through what John Corner (2011, p. 210) refers to as a ‘sustained exercise in reflexivity’.

My dissertation conducts research into various methods for minimising authorial control and filtering evidence through a networked inquiry. I later assess i-docs’ merits as a form for interpreting media manipulation. Through this project, I propose a journalistic documentary design practice, affording a multidisciplinary network of inquiry.

As a cultural form, the i-doc has potential to afford qualities of independence sought by documentary practitioners choosing to work beyond the broadcaster. The contingent qualities of i-docs allow the unforeseeable and unexpected to open contested historical events, and disrupt how linear media affords their untimely closure.