Interactive web documentaries have the potential to engage people with important topics through innovative storytelling approaches. Understanding how users interact with web documentaries and to what extent they consume their content can help documentary filmmakers reach a broader or more engaged audience. This project tries to contribute to this gap in knowledge by analysing a serialized web documentary called iOtok (which we also helped build in collaboration with CORA and ASTRAL FILMS). The 13 episodes of iOtok were launched on an online portal showcasing a variety of features (chat, souvenirs, animated 360 panoramas, etc.), on a weekly basis. We collected data from 20 000 sessions, 12 200 videos watched, newsletter engagement and one online questionnaire all collected over a period of 1 year. We conduct analysis utilising advanced visualization and computational techniques that try to leverage on standard observational techniques such as manual coding by multiple researchers in order to provide insight about the impact of serialization and interactivity on audience reception, user engagement and viewing behaviour.
Publications:
Ducasse, J., Kljun, M., & Čopič Pucihar, K. (2020). Interactive Web Documentaries: A Case Study of Audience Reception and User Engagement on iOtok. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction.