What is Research through Documentary?

Ways of doing documentary research: research into, for and through documentary

Wed 31st March 2021, UCLIC Research Seminar Series

In this invited talk, I discussed my experiences as a researcher and documentary-maker in various professional and research contexts. I described various projects I have been involved in that combine documentary and research in interesting ways (including Design Research Works) and framed the discussion around three approaches to documentary research, inspired by three approaches to design as outlined by Frayling (1993): Research into Documentary (i.e. learning about documentary); Research for Documentary (i.e. developing tools, systems and processes to enable, support and advance documentary) and Research through Documentary (i.e. creating new knowledge through the processes of making documentaries).

Relevant papers

Green, D. P. et al. (2021) ‘‘You wouldn’t get that from watching TV!’: Exploring audience responses to virtual reality non-fiction in the home’, Convergence. doi: 10.1177/1354856520979966.

Green, D. P. et al (2017) Enabling Polyvocality in Interactive Documentaries through “Structural Participation”. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6317–6329. DOI: 10.1145/3025453.3025606

Written by

Dr David Philip Green

Dave is a Senior Research Associate on the project. He is a Design Researcher with a background in participatory documentary making and Human Computer Interaction. His core role on in Design Research Works is to produce a series of documentary films relating to the world of Design Research.