Defining “Done” in Oral History and Interactive Documentaries

What does it mean when we say a project is done? It’s a provocative question frequently part of oral history and digital humanities discussions; at Oral History Association meetings in the United States, mini-workshops are routinely held asking what done looks like. One model could focus on fieldwork, such as interviewing everyone available who was involved in a particular phenomena — or at least a critical mass. At this point, the fieldwork phase of a project might be considered to be done.But what about the post-fieldwork phase? Is a project done when that journal article is written? A book published or documentary screened? Or perhaps the marker might be a virtual reality exhibition, the establishment of an online archive, or the completion of an interactive media space. Each of these elements could be construed as a sign of a project reaching its logical concluding point. Here we want to attempt to address the phenomenology of what we are dubbing “doneness,” or the concept of when a project is completed, using two specific projects as examples. Each was conceived as a interactive documentary (i-doc), or a space where co-creation of meaning is prioritized (Aston, Gaudenzi, and Rose 2017), and developed using feminist oral history practices of shared authority (Chase and Bell 1994). The harmony and disharmony found within the process offers practitioners and scholars insights into the practicality of the concept of “doneness.”While the i-doc is still a developing format, there are some broad parameters as to what the form is. The working definition is open-ended, including “any project that starts with the intention to engage with the real, and that uses digital interactive technology to realise this intention” (Aston, Gaudenzi and Rose 2017, 3) including online, virtual reality, augmented reality, and interactive installations. Our own creative practice recognizes how some key facets of the i-doc mesh with foundational practices of feminist oral history, in specific, its focus on strategies of co-creation between researcher/project creator, narrators, and audiences. Here, co-creation may mean different things depending upon the positionality of the individual While audience members may not contribute content, they have agency to shift the meaning through their understanding and experience of the interactive project. Narrators, by contrast, may work more closely with the project creator to develop and frame the meaning of content. The i-doc’s flexibility and experimentation in form is “characterized by interdeterminancy, community, and risk” (De Michiel and Zimmermann 2020, 356) It’s also plagued by technological challenges — what happens when technology becomes obsolete or dies and how does that contribute to a project’s conceptualization of completion? With this in mind, in this paper we offer a working definition of doneness based upon our own practical experience and research from both the open sciences (Humphreys et al 2021) and the digital humanities (Sewell 2009). We also consider the three participants in co-creation found in i-docs: the researcher, the narrator, and the audience. In it, we offer a starting point to answer the question: “are we done?”

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