Encountering the World with I-docs

Encountering the world with i-Docs argues for the values of interactive documentary as a social research method. Interactive documentaries, or i-docs, are web-based, nonlinear forms of multi-media documentary. There is a burgeoning commercial i-docs industry and rich scholarship on interactive and immersive media in media studies, yet i-docs remain relatively unknown in the social sciences. This is despite their exciting potentials for illuminating and communicating pressing social issues. T This book shows how i-doc making harnesses multi-perspectival, co-creative and nonlinear modes of attention to the social world and can illuminate social research topics including temporalities, power, and space, affect and structure of feeling, freedom, and epistemic injustice. It does so by discussing my own pioneering methodological work with i-doc and participatory i-doc making, locating this within other examples of commercial, activist and research i-docs. As well as promoting the making of digital i-doc platforms as a method, the book proposes that social researchers can think with i-docs without necessarily producing one (which can be costly and require technical expertise). It provides a template for planning an i-doc and explores how the planning process alone can open new ways of understanding social research topics.