About this Research Topic
From deepfakes to immersive media, mobile AR applications, news, documentary games, animation documentary, and graphic journalism, the contemporary, meaningfully related fields of documentary film and visual journalism have arguably grown ever more diverse and complex with the proliferation of innovative digital/visual technologies and storytelling formats. The affordances of a converged network culture and ‘hybrid media system’ (Chadwick, 2013), combined with a sociocultural atmosphere of fluidity, reflexivity, and transparency, and with developments including CGI, AI/machine learning, database, immersive, and mobile (camera) technologies, have spurred and enabled hybrid transformations and transgressions of the modalities of documentary and journalistic imagery to engage (with) the historical—‘our shared’—world and see it ‘afresh’ (Nichols, 2016), in both mimetic and aesthetic-expressive ways. Variously traversing and corroding binary oppositions between, most notably, reference/imagination, fact/fiction, objectivity/subjectivity, cognition/affect, evidentiality/experientiality, information/entertainment, representation/action, producer/user, and human/machine, hybrids feed and reinvigorate formative and normative conversations in documentary and journalism (studies), relating to questions of ‘truth’ and/or ‘public’ value, while ultimately involving processes of “definition making, boundary work and legitimation” (Carlson, 2016).
As such, the present Research Topic engages with ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical questions emerging from contemporary processes and products of hybridization, or ‘de-differentiation’ (Baym, 2017), in documentary and visual journalism. In line with the Greek etymological origins of ‘hybrid,’ which suggest an understanding of ‘hybridity’ as “something that questions conventional understandings and the accepted order” (Chadwick, 2013), crossings pertaining to non-fiction imagery as a communicative form, genre, discourse, or practice open up a vibrant space for rethinking normative conceptions, creative experimentation, intertextuality, and reflexivity; for renewed, alternate, or extended representational strategies and scopic technologies to witness, imagine, (bodily) experience, and variously connect with physical and sociohistorical reality; or for enhancing audience engagement, participation, and polyvocality.
At the same time, though, by stretching or transgressing established codes and conventions, hybrids play up and intensify longtime problems of definition and delineation, concerns about issues of manipulation, disinformation, and dilution of documentary/journalistic/public values, and ethical issues entwined with the treatment of, and responsibilities towards, image subjects and audiences. In order to profoundly understand and assess the merits and limitations of the diversified and dispersed landscape of contemporary documentary and journalistic imagery, its pro-social and anti-normative manifestations, potentials and/or risks, and to ascertain its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications, this Research Topic aims to bring together conceptualizations, empirical analyses, and innovative methodologies that span and possibly bridge the multidisciplinary, increasingly prolific fields of documentary and journalism studies.
We invite conceptual, empirical, and methodological research articles tackling the outlined themes and issues of hybridity from diverse disciplinary approaches and analytical perspectives, covering topics including, but not limited to:
- visual/multimodal representation, depiction, display, rhetoric, storytelling, performance, and evocation in case examples of hybridity, such as VR/immersive documentaries/journalism; animated documentary/graphic journalism; docugames/news games; location/geo-based AR in documentary/journalistic practice; interactive documentaries/journalism; drone journalism; mockumentaries or fake documentaries/news in the digital age
- uses of artificial intelligence/machine learning technology in the creative process of documentary and visual journalism production, both actual and potential
- hybrids and the politics of representation, communicative power, social values, public engagement, and disinformation applied to, for instance, urgent global themes such as environmental issues, war/conflict, migration, or the pandemic
- (re)considerations of image ethics in hybrid documentary/visual journalism, addressing issues of harm, trust and misrepresentation, moral values of integrity, honesty, or care, and exemplifying or contemplating good practice
- user perspectives shedding light on audience engagement with hybrid forms of documentary and visual journalism, cognitive and affective investments, collaborative and participatory approaches, polyvocality, and visual/multimodal literacy
- investigations of how current developments in hybrid documentary/journalism relate to shifting institutional contexts of production and distribution, from streaming, social media, and content sharing platforms to independent/alternative/slow media and crossovers between creative industries or communities of practice.
As such, the present Research Topic engages with ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical questions emerging from contemporary processes and products of hybridization, or ‘de-differentiation’ (Baym, 2017), in documentary and visual journalism. In line with the Greek etymological origins of ‘hybrid,’ which suggest an understanding of ‘hybridity’ as “something that questions conventional understandings and the accepted order” (Chadwick, 2013), crossings pertaining to non-fiction imagery as a communicative form, genre, discourse, or practice open up a vibrant space for rethinking normative conceptions, creative experimentation, intertextuality, and reflexivity; for renewed, alternate, or extended representational strategies and scopic technologies to witness, imagine, (bodily) experience, and variously connect with physical and sociohistorical reality; or for enhancing audience engagement, participation, and polyvocality.
At the same time, though, by stretching or transgressing established codes and conventions, hybrids play up and intensify longtime problems of definition and delineation, concerns about issues of manipulation, disinformation, and dilution of documentary/journalistic/public values, and ethical issues entwined with the treatment of, and responsibilities towards, image subjects and audiences. In order to profoundly understand and assess the merits and limitations of the diversified and dispersed landscape of contemporary documentary and journalistic imagery, its pro-social and anti-normative manifestations, potentials and/or risks, and to ascertain its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications, this Research Topic aims to bring together conceptualizations, empirical analyses, and innovative methodologies that span and possibly bridge the multidisciplinary, increasingly prolific fields of documentary and journalism studies.
We invite conceptual, empirical, and methodological research articles tackling the outlined themes and issues of hybridity from diverse disciplinary approaches and analytical perspectives, covering topics including, but not limited to:
- visual/multimodal representation, depiction, display, rhetoric, storytelling, performance, and evocation in case examples of hybridity, such as VR/immersive documentaries/journalism; animated documentary/graphic journalism; docugames/news games; location/geo-based AR in documentary/journalistic practice; interactive documentaries/journalism; drone journalism; mockumentaries or fake documentaries/news in the digital age
- uses of artificial intelligence/machine learning technology in the creative process of documentary and visual journalism production, both actual and potential
- hybrids and the politics of representation, communicative power, social values, public engagement, and disinformation applied to, for instance, urgent global themes such as environmental issues, war/conflict, migration, or the pandemic
- (re)considerations of image ethics in hybrid documentary/visual journalism, addressing issues of harm, trust and misrepresentation, moral values of integrity, honesty, or care, and exemplifying or contemplating good practice
- user perspectives shedding light on audience engagement with hybrid forms of documentary and visual journalism, cognitive and affective investments, collaborative and participatory approaches, polyvocality, and visual/multimodal literacy
- investigations of how current developments in hybrid documentary/journalism relate to shifting institutional contexts of production and distribution, from streaming, social media, and content sharing platforms to independent/alternative/slow media and crossovers between creative industries or communities of practice.
Keywords: hybridity, visual journalism, documentary, immersiveness, VR, AR, CGI, animation, artifical intelligence, drones, ethics, audience engagement
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
