MIT Open Documentary Lab Launches _docubase — from filmmakermagazine.com by Sarah Salovaara

Excerpt:

As a consumer of new media – to say nothing of its makers – how does one go about keeping abreast of the emerging form’s constant developments? MIT Open Documentary Lab hopes to keep interested parties up to speed with _docubase, a new project that was launched yesterday at IDFA. A curated platform, _docubase will maintain an open dialogue on the “new documentary,” the fledging form that draws from interactive and community-created fact-based storytelling.

 

Also see:

 

MITs-docubase-launches11-23-13

Excerpt:

‘Unruly’ best describes the amazing documentaries that we’ve gathered together in _docubase. True, all share an interest in innovation, in tapping the potentials of digital technologies to tell their stories. But the similarity stops there. Interactive, collaborative, location-based, community-created, parts of larger trans-media experiences … the projects gathered here defy easy categorization. They are made by and with communities, journalists, citizen-activists, film and video makers, game-designers, community organizers, data-visualizers and ordinary people. Some production teams model their credits on the conventions of film, others on games, and still others invent new ways of describing their work. Why so complicated? Because we are witnessing a rare moment that is in equal parts creative and inchoate.

_docubase offers multiple ways of bringing order to this complexity: