=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3026/paper1
|storemode=property
|title=A study on the Possibilities of Interactive Documentary through Political Aesthetics and Text Mining
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3026/paper1.pdf
|volume=Vol-3026
|authors=Hochang Kwon
}}
==A study on the Possibilities of Interactive Documentary through Political Aesthetics and Text Mining==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3026/paper1.pdf
A study on the possibilities of interactive documentary
through political aesthetics and text mining
Hochang Kwon
Sungkyunkwan University, Transmedia Institute, 03063, Jongno, Seoul, Korea
kwonhc000@skku.edu
Abstract. Interactive documentary refers to a new style of documentary that is
created and accepted through active interaction in a cloud server using various
multimedia materials. Interactive documentaries are attracting attention as a plat-
form that forms a public sphere for social issues and mediate audiences to directly
participate in social change through cognitive and affective experiences based on
interactivity. However, from a theoretical point of view, the possibilities were not
systematically explored, and from a practical point of view, there was a lack of
consideration of effective strategies and methods to develop them. In this paper,
as a theoretical basis, discussions on the political aesthetics of Walter Benjamin,
especially the politicization of art, are examined. And, through text mining, we
examine the media characteristics of interactive documentary focusing on the
technology. And by connecting the three attributes of the politicization of art and
the three media characteristics of the interactive documentary, a map of its polit-
ical and aesthetic possibilities is drawn. This study is a preliminary study to make
an analysis and planning methodology for interactive documentaries, and in sub-
sequent studies, a study on strategies to develop the political and aesthetic possi-
bilities proposed in this paper will be conducted.
Keywords: Walter Benjamin, Politicization of Art, Interdisciplinary Research,
Digital Humanities, Transmedia Activism
1 Introduction
‘Interactive Documentary’ refers to a new style of documentary that is created and ac-
cepted through active interactivity on a cloud server using various multimedia materi-
als. Interactive documentary can be said to be a representative practice type of trans-
media that has emerged due to the recent rapid media convergence. With the develop-
ment and dissemination of various mobile devices, it is expanding its scope to applica-
tions, social media, and VR/AR as well as traditional media.[1]
Copyright © by the paper’s authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribu-
tion 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). In: N. D. Vo, O.-J. Lee, K.-H. N. Bui, H. G. Lim, H.-J.
Jeon, P.-M. Nguyen, B. Q. Tuyen, J.-T. Kim, J. J. Jung, T. A. Vo (eds.): Proceedings of the
2nd International Conference on Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (Computing4Human
2021), Da Nang, Viet Nam, 28-October-2021, published at http://ceur-ws.org
12 Hochang Kwon
Interactive documentaries with transmedia characteristics are attracting attention as
a useful tool to practice collective intelligence through global participation and solidar-
ity. In addition, it is making a big change in the cultural, artistic, academic, and indus-
trial paradigms as well as the mechanisms of creation and acceptance.[2]
Among many interactive documentaries, works of an activist characteristic that di-
rectly dealt with social issues have garnered attention from audiences and critics. These
works seek to expose the absurdity and contradiction of reality, give a cognitive and
emotional shock to the audience, and form a public sphere for problem solving, based
on an alternative perspective that mass media does not deal with. This activism has
been emphasized in traditional documentaries, and interactive documentaries try to per-
form this role more effectively by utilizing new media technologies.
Despite the active research and production in this regard, there are some shortcom-
ings. First, from a theoretical point of view, the political and aesthetic possibilities of
interactive documentaries were not systematically explored. Although excellent works
have been produced depending on the artist's ability, theoretical studies on the possibil-
ity have not been sufficient. In addition, there has been a lack of research on how to
develop the possibility of interactive documentary and maximize its effect from a prac-
tical point of view. It is necessary to study the planning methodology for expanding the
denotation and connotation through connection with other media, and activating the
participation of the audience.
In this context, this paper explores the rich political and aesthetic possibilities of
interactive documentaries, and plans strategies to develop them. For this, the following
three tasks are performed. First, on a theoretical basis, we examine the discussions on
the political aesthetics of Walter Benjamin, especially the politicization of art. Through
literature research, the concrete contents of the politicization of art that Benjamin ar-
gued are summarized into three. Second, it examines the media characteristics of inter-
active documentaries, focusing on the technology that is the material foundation. Arti-
cles on interactive documentaries are text-mined and their distinguishing features as
media characteristics are summarized into three. Third, it rearranges and intersects the
three attributes of the politicization of art and the three media characteristics of inter-
active documentaries. Through this, we draw a map of the political and aesthetic pos-
sibilities of an interactive documentary.
2 Walter Benjamin's political aesthetics – the
politicization of art
In this chapter, as a theoretical basis, discussions on the political aesthetics of Walter
Benjamin, especially the politicization of art, are examined. Benjamin says in his , communism should confront the
‘aestheticization of politics’ of fascism with ‘politicization of art’. What is fascism's
‘aestheticization of politics’ is described relatively clearly with specific examples in the
paper. However, there are scattered discussions about what is the ‘politicization of art’
that faces fascism, and debates about its meaning continue among several researchers.
It is difficult to organize all of these discussions clearly in this paper. Here, we would
A study on the possibilities of interactive documentary 13
like to summarize the concrete contents or attributes of ‘politicization of art’ into the
following three, focusing on two thesis -[3], [4]- that best reveal Benjamin's political
aesthetics.
First, it is the change of the author's role and characteristics. Benjamin in his thesis
emphasizes that artworks are ‘social products’ and that the author is ‘producers’. In the
existing capitalist relations of production, it is argued that the distinction according to
specialization should be crushed through the ‘refunctioning’(Umfunktionisierung) of
the artistic means of production, and cooperation between the author and the audience
should be made so that each person can freely use the means of production for their
own work. Shim notes that Benjamin's ‘author as producer' organizes cooperative rela-
tions of production to promote the socialization of intellectual means of production. In
order to change into a new relation of production, it is necessary to pay attention not
only to the author as a producer but also to the author as an organizer.[5]
Second, it is the change of the audience's perception system. Benjamin says that a
cinema is basically a moving image, and because it is composed by editing, it has a
different acceptance method than a traditional artwork that requires immersion. This is
called distributed perception or tactile perception, and he advocates it as the political
possibility of new popular art. Instead of being passively immersed in the imaginary,
the ‘distracted’ audience actively absorbs it, and maintains an analytical and critical
attitude toward what they see without being hesitated by the atmosphere. In that sense,
Benjamin defined the cinema’s audience as ‘distracted inspectors’ and expected them
to leave the theater as a collective subject of social criticism. Benjamin believed that
the new way of perception made by technology would raise public criticism.
Third, it is the creation of a play space (Spielraum). Benjamin says that what hap-
pened with the collapse of the aura in artworks is the expansion of the play space, and
the cinema has become the widest play space. In several works, Benjamin emphasizes
the healing, educational, and emancipatory character of play(spiel).[6] Benjamin says
that the cinema opens up a world of visual unconsciousness, increasing insights into the
inevitability that dominates our existence. At the same time, he says that the cinema is
an entertainment as a form of play based on social life. In the process of collectively
accepting the new art of cinema, the public enjoys it as an entertainment and at the same
time imitates and practice life in the city with a critical attitude.
3 Media characteristics of interactive documentaries
In this chapter, we examine the media characteristics of interactive documentaries fo-
cusing on technology through text mining. First, we searched for articles in the ‘Web
of Science’ database using ‘interactive documentary’ and ‘web documentary’ as key-
words. From 528 search results, only 491 journal articles without missing metadata
from the 2000s were selected. For the abstracts of these articles, text mining was per-
formed using Orange[7] and Vosviewer[8] data analysis software. After text prepro-
cessing, 181 terms were selected with a minimum occurrence of 10 or more and a rel-
evance score of 60% or more. Using these terms, a co-occurrence network was created
14 Hochang Kwon
and hierarchical clustering was performed. As shown in Figure 1, it was divided into
three clusters.
Fig. 1. The co-occurrence network of the main terms of the articles
Among the terms included in each cluster, terms related to technical factors are se-
lected in order of relevance score as follows.
- Cluster 1: interaction, engagement, exploration, participation
- Cluster 2: resource, data collection, database, multimedia
- Cluster 3: access, web, portal, internet, social network
The keywords of each cluster can be seen as representing the media characteristics
of the interactive documentary, and its specific contents are as follows.
The keyword representing Cluster 1 is interactivity. As can be seen in the term in-
teractive documentary, interactivity is one of the key attributes that distinguish tradi-
tional documentaries from interactive documentaries. In terms of interactivity,
Gaudenzi explains that users have an agency, that is, they can take physically meaning-
ful actions on artifacts (or within those artifacts) and see the results directly.[9] Because
of its interactivity, the recipient of interactive documentary is referred to as a user, not
as an audience or viewer. In this respect, Dovey and Rose regard the creators and users
of interactive documentaries as members of a total relationship, explain that they
emerged from the network of relationships.[10]
The keyword representing Cluster 2 is multimedia. Interactive documentaries use
various types of multimedia contents (video, audio, photos, text, animation, info-
graphic, etc.), and these are stored in a database. Meaning is created only when a user
enters this database and combines and visualizes multimedia contents in an interface.
In this sense, interactive documentary can be said to be the user's selection and trajec-
tory in the database. The sensory modality in the user’s activity is complex (or synes-
thesia), and its trajectory is nonlinear.
A study on the possibilities of interactive documentary 15
The keyword representing Cluster 3 is network. Interactive documentaries generally
take place on the web (more precisely, a cloud server), which functions as a platform
in which creation, acceptance, and distribution are integrated. Due to the development
of network technology, the platform can be accessed through a variety of devices. It
facilitates information production and diffusion by users, enables interactive message
delivery and acceptance, and allows more diverse members to participate beyond time
and space. In other words, the interactive documentary platform connects people (cre-
ators and audience) to people, people to content, and content to content in real time.
4 Political and aesthetic possibilities of interactive
documentaries
In this chapter, the three attributes of the politicization of art and the three media char-
acteristics of the interactive documentary discussed above are rearranged and inter-
sected. Through this work, we draw a map of the political and aesthetic possibilities of
an interactive documentary.
The three media characteristics of interactive documentary -multimedia, interactiv-
ity, and network- correspond to material, form, and substance (or function) in semiotic
systems, respectively. And the three attributes of the politicization of art -the artist as a
producer and organizer, the change of the perception system, and the creation of a play
space- correspond to the change of producers, recipients, and contents from a political
aesthetic perspective. Table 1 shows a matrix using these two as the horizontal and
vertical axes, respectively.
Table 1. The Political and aesthetic possibilities of interactive documentaries
16 Hochang Kwon
From a Marxist point of view, the horizontal axis represents the means of production,
and the vertical axis represents the relations of production. According to Benjamin, the
author must organize the public and intellectuals from various angles through the re-
functioning of the literary means of production given to him in the existing relations of
production.[3] The contents indicated by the diagonal shade in Table 1 can be said to
be the blueprint for this refunctioning. The rest of the content can be said to be the
condition or foundation for achieving the refunctioning.
5 Conclusion
In this paper, by connecting Benjamin's discussion on the politicization of art and the
media characteristics of interactive documentaries, its political and aesthetic possibili-
ties were examined. This paper is a framework for the first of the two issues raised in
the introduction. Building on this research, we will proceed with a follow-up study on
the second problem, practical strategies for developing possibilities. Details of the fol-
low-up study are as follows.
First, the whole process from planning to acceptance(use) of the interactive docu-
mentary will be closely examined, and how the possibilities proposed in this study can
be combined into this process. And through various case studies, we will analyze in
detail how the interactive documentary work was planned and worked, and what were
its problems and limitations. Through this research, we will derive an effective strategy
for interactive documentary as a transmedia activism, and develop an analysis and plan-
ning methodology.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and
the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A5B5A16083590)
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