I mentioned before that documentary films may offer a better paradigm for ways of presenting scholarly information on the Web rather than the printed book. Webumentary is a rather horrible word and in another posting I’ll explore the use of that word on the net, but for now I want to examine one of the leading studios producing this type of work: Terra Incognita Productions out of Austin, Texas, which uses the more enticing word interactive documentary.

Terra Incognita has done a number of very well produced sites for National Geographic and different museums. See the company’s home page for examples.

Interactive Media Design Review posts an article about the work done to create Becoming Human - which won an award for interactive media design - along with an interview with designer Bart Marable. (Unfortunately, when I last looked at this site on 3/3/05, not all the elements loaded properly).

The article points out how Becoming Human uses a three-tier information architecture of slideshow, exhibits, and resources in a well-organized hypermedia structure: “this site maintains order by organizing itself around the simplest line, keeping it visible at all times and easy to rejoin.”

The article also quotes new media consultant Hillman Curtis: the site is “not overdesigned…in fact, the design does nothing more than properly support and displa the content, which is harder to do than it sounds.”

In the final section of the article’s review of Becoming Human: “Perhaps Becoming Human signals a new link in the evolution of Web media: the advent of the Webumentary.”

The best part of this article is the interview with designer Bart Marable:

“Our central challenge was telling the story to an extremely broad audience…a compelling introduction [was needed]…So we had to find a way to make the story work on multiple levels. Our solution was to develop three distinct but interconnected tiers to the experience. The top tier, which we called the Program level, was designed as a lean-back experience that the visitor could watch like a television documentary. The second tier, called the Exhibit level, was more interactive than the Program, but was richly designed with hands-on activities and strong visuals. And the third tier - the Reference level - was a database-driven reference desk with a glossary, bibliography, and Web site directory. While each tier is distinct, they’re also interconnected. For example, while a visitor is watching the documentary, he might follow a teaser to an exhibit related to the program. The related resources tab also brings up context-sensitive content based on your location.

Marable points out that the project took about 9 months to produce and included a team of 7: director, writers, producer, editor, flash developer, associate producer, technology director….some of the roles overlapped among positons.

Bart Marable himself wrote an engaging article A Walk through an Online Exhbiti that examines the Smithsonian’s African Voices exhibit. Even five years later, the article is still worth reading and very informative about its use of information architecture and design.

Marable points out that Terra Incognita looks to museum exhibits as one of the best models for the Web. Of course, this is nothing new. My own work in 1993 in developing web sites for the Library of Congress followed the exhibit model, which is indeed a very good model.

Marable: “If the designer has done a good job of outlining the site’s information architecture, this navigation zone clearly outlines the scope and organization of the site’s content. Does this mean that the site is also engaging? Not necessarily.”

Marable talks about museum exhibits and tried to mimic their arrangement online in order for users to experience a sense of “unstructured exploration [that] also leads to unexpected discoveries, since visitors are drawn into stories that they might have otherwise overlooked. Our site design needed to incorporate this visual, flowing navigation with an online version of these sight lines.”

Marable has written another article Bringing Stories to Life Online where he talks about using stories to bring content to life. This article talks about a project for National Geographic called At the Tomb of Tutankhamen. Marable writes “We sometimes find it helpful to develop a back story…to tie together a site’s creative approach.”

While Web design often resemble the printed page, Marable believes that “it’s helpful to think of the Web as a 4D story space. Designers …[can] control the timing and pace of the story. Structuring this story space is crucial for bringing an interactive story to life.”

Marable also provides in a sidebar to this article an interesting technique for stimulating motion.

A more in-depth article by Marable on these and other projects is in a paper he prepared for the Museums and the Web 2004 conference: Experience, learning, and Research: Coordinating the Multiple Roles of On-line Exhibitions

Yesterday, the director of a North American research library said to me “Fifteen years ago, no one could have predicted that we now would be accessing full-text journals and newspapers over the Internet. Then we were focused on spending money on local networking of CD-ROM towers to get to this mateiral. Who would have known what the future had in store.”

In the early 1990s, however, it was fairly easy to predict (though with some risk) that the networked present would have developed. Of course, it may not have been so obvious that it would have developed to such a great extent, be so commercialized and an integrated part of many people’s lives. But, the point is that careful, reasoned thinking about technology forecasting can result in fairly clear insights as to what is 10 years down the road. While the specifics may be fuzzy and the predictions may not always be on target, visoins of the information future are emerging. And interestingly, the vision is often coming from outside of the library community. Perhaps that’s just because libarians (and I am one myself) are - by necessity - so focused on providing library services that meet the present day-to-day needs of their users that little time is left over for reflective thinking about the future. Of course, there are small segments of the library profession that are thinking very hard about the future, but I suspect that this dialogue is not an essential fabric of most daily library operations.

Richard Koman asks “Who wants yesterday’s papers?”. He references Dan Gilmor’s blog entry that challenges newspapers to oopen up their archives.

Koman also links to Simon Waldman’s entry on The Importance of Being Permanent, which is a very interesting article with thoughful comments from others.

I think that it’s inevitable that, at some point, an Internet search engine, such as Google, realizes that it can purchase quality content for a price and then make it available through its search portal and subsidize the cost through advertising. At this point, which is very likely to happen within the next ten years, what role will libraries adopt? Libraries now spend millions on licensing full-text electronic resources but what happens when another, larger player enters this marketplace?

Maybe, if quality full-text content is available through another source, libraries will focus their material funds on the creation of content and partner with companies such as Google to make the information accessible. This would be a dramatic shift for libraries, which would move from being consumers and “middlemen” in the information chain to being producers (or even publishers). The end result could result in not only advantages for a library’s own specific patrons but also in supporting open access to information, a particularly important issue for developing countries.

The O’Reilly Network published an interview with Lawrence Lessing on a topic that Lessig calls remix culture. It reminds me a lot of Bolter’s & Grusin’s work Remediation: Understanding New Media.

Lessig points out that some of the copyright lawsuits are, in actuality, not about copyright but as a means of one company blocking product innovation and the creation of new ways of distributing content: “it’s a strategic opportunity to exercise control over the future of content development and distribution, and not so much as a way of protecting copyrights.”

Lessig mentions the sampling license developed by the Creative Commons that allows for sampling of songs but not for the re-distribution of those songs: “it’s encouraging the kind of creativity that the technology has at its soul: the creativity, which you’re going to see more of in music and film, the creativity of remixing other creativity.”

Central to the concept being explored through this blog is the re-purposing of material. The is expressed elegantly by Lessig and I want to quote him extensively:

One way I’ve begun to think about this is to question whether within our culture, writing is allowed. Now when you say the word writing, for those of us over the age of 15, our conception of writing is writing with text, and in fact our tradition protects the right to write with text and to draw upon other people’s writings with text quite substantially. People can review my book and quote my words in reviewing my book, criticize me, do whatever they want, and that’s protected by a tradition of fair use that has taken hundreds of years to develop but is now pretty strong.

But if you think about the ways kids under 15 using digital technology think about writing–you know, writing with text is just one way to write, and not even the most interesting way to write. The more interesting ways are increasingly to use images and sound and video to express ideas. Well, all of those ways of writing under the law as it’s understood right now are basically illegal unless you secure permission from the author up front. So the same act of creativity in some sense, you know, taking, creating, mixing out of what other people do, is legal in the text world and illegal in the digital media world. And the struggle is to get people to recognize that there’s no good reason for the rules to be so radically different between the two contexts, and that we ought to be encouraging a wider range of creativity using digital media–both because there are many people who would be extraordinarily talented in exploiting those types of creativity, and also because it would really spur growth in collective literacy about how media itself functions and how it has its effect.