Moving On From Manvers Street

I have recently launched my digital documentary Moving On From Manvers Street as part of my ongoing studies in New Media writing at DMU.  The trailer is very tongue in cheek, but that is characteristic of the tone of the whole piece.  

The documentary focuses on using Web 2.0 principles to present the story of the first bus station at Bath, which was located in Manvers Street until its demolition in July 2007.  As someone who both worked there and has an interest in the way buildings fit into our culture, I wanted to examine how this functional building would be remembered and how people would engage with those memories in a digital format.

Defining and designing a digital or Web 2.0 documentary was a challenging process.  How and where does one present a Web 2.0 documentary?  What should it look like?  How will people interact with it and contribute to it in the spirit of Web 2.0?  What features of a traditional documentary should be retained? What elements of Web 2.0 philosophy should be included to make it a web-native design, rather than an online version of a traditional documentary?

 

I had two options: producing my own website enabled for user interaction, or making use of existing Web 2.0 tools such as aggregators, which would involve sacrificing an element of control over the content and design, but provide pre-existing mechanisms for collating and disseminating information – common purposes of documentaries.

 

I experimented with two similar aggregating tools – PageFlakes and Netvibes.  Both involved layouts that comprised of boxed widgets for live feeds, which would mean that I and others could add content about the Manvers Street Bus Station at various locations (such as YouTube or blogs) and it would automatically be collected and presented by the aggregator.

 

There were several issues:

 

-       Although feeds were easy to set up, both platforms had limited customisation facilities and it was difficult to add static elements other than text or still images.  The latter was particularly problematic when considering how to add the commentary element of the documentary, which would provide the context for all the content sources.

-       The commercial nature of the sites meant that templates and features could change, so the way the project would appear over time could change without prior notice to me as the creator.

-       There are also issues of ownership of content involved not just in the aggregator interface, but in every individual widget – I needed to manage accounts with several content hosts (such as YouTube, Flickr etc) and to have investigated the degree to which they individually claim ownership of content stored there.

 

I therefore opted to design my own site and instead consider how to integrate Web 2.0 principles and facilities into its design.  I really focused on interactivity and user-generated content as the two main features that I needed to work into my design. 

 

The first consideration was integrating the piece with existing Web 2.0 facilities.  I developed a trailer for the project, which I uploaded to Daily Motion (a video hosting site) and disseminated via Facebook.  I also uploaded interview clips to this service so that the participants involved can embed and forward the clips of themselves to their contacts – all with a link to the URL for the project.  This was partly a promotion strategy, but also established a connection between the project and an audience who are already familiar with interactive sites.

 

Within the site itself, I added several opportunities for contribution.  I invite people to contribute to the Wikipedia article I started, detailing the history of the bus station, and provided a blog with short posts posing questions, which invite comments.  This use of a blog was inspired by Sue Thomas’ use of her blog The Wild Surmise as a research tool.  In both instances I used the <iframe> tag in html to allow the external site to appear within a page of my own – thus helping to retain the audience, rather than allowing them to wander off into other sites.

 

The remainder of the design featured video clips of me presenting the content of each page, thus providing a narrative to the site and a cohesive gel to the content without masses of text.  Within the piece I cast myself as the presenter, but my overall role varied from page to page – sometimes I was a writer (Wikipedia, The WTF File), sometimes a archivist (Interviews), sometimes an editor (The Last Day), sometimes a facilitator for audience participation (Memories), sometimes a composer…

 

 As a documentary inviting audience contributions, I felt it was difficult to be overly analytical or probing in my narrative.  Instead, I opted to raise issues in the introduction, then simply present the different view points and contributions so that the audience can mull over whether I had a valid point that functional buildings, like the Manvers Street Bus Station, should be remembered and what we miss by dismissing them as ugly.  Several of the responses I received were quite insightful on this issue, but several interviewees did have difficulty separating the Bus Station from being “on the buses”.  This confirmed for me that culture – which has moved and lives on – was the integral feature of the building, not its fabric.

 

The documentary can be found at www.manvers-street.com.  Any contributions to the project, or thoughts about the issues raised here concerning the design of a digital documentary, are very welcome!