An Ethnography of Collaboration in the Production of the Polyphonic Documentary ‘Can You Feel the Heat?’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘Can You Feel The Heat?’ is the result of an exploration of the role of sound and colour in interactive documentary. It was produced collaboratively by members of the ‘Polyphonic Documentary’ online research group, drawing from 96 video clips on heat and climate change shared by group members for this purpose. Each was motivated by a shared interest in conducting practice-led research on non-linear, interactive forms of non-fictional representation where the language of image and sound was foregrounded over the spoken word. As they worked together over the course of a year, the collaborative methodology they adopted enriched and informed the research process as each experimented both practically and conceptually with the chosen software in response to the research question: ‘Considering the unpredictable outcomes of the non-linear interactive documentary form, how does a creative process driven by a felt response to sound and colour inform eventual meaning?’ For their theoretical framing, the authors of ‘Can You Feel The Heat?’ adopted the Bakhtinian principles of dialogic polyphony and multi-perspectival approaches to the non-linear narrative presented at the project outset by the founders of the ‘Polyphonic Documentary’ research group Aston & Odorico (2018). The non-linear editing software Korsakow, was chosen by the authors based on its potential to provide unpredictable and unexpected juxtapositions of the single narrative units (snu) used in the editing process. This allowed for added meaning to be generated through the editing process as the three researchers explored the possibilities of abstraction and non-verbal meaning-making via juxtaposition and montage. As in a successful linear montage sequence, where meaning is added through the juxtaposition of individually disparate elements, the interactive piece that resulted from the collaboration became more than the sum of its parts. The three researchers were from diverse nationalities, ages, and academic backgrounds, and the combination of their individual knowledge, expertise, and creativity offered their own surprising juxtapositions of ideas and intentions. In the oft-cited experiment of the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, where two images produced an additional meaning resulting from the juxtaposition (‘one plus one equals three’), ‘Can You Feel the Heat?’ could be seen to demonstrate that one plus one plus one equals five (three artists/researchers) and the added meaning the ‘juxtaposition’ of their collaboration contributed. This paper draws on these principles of montage and juxtaposition to offer an analysis of the relationship between the creative process and the final product, making an argument for montage as a method. It combines descriptions and examples of the practice with extracts from the meeting transcripts and personal notes of each of the authors to present an auto-ethnographic study of the collaborative methodology adopted, the creative output and the shared and individual conclusions reached.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".