Transmedia Analytics

Hello world!

Let us introduce to you a future returning item on our blog: ‘visualisations as knowledge machines’. As you know we are focussing now on Submarine’s ‘Last Hijack’, which has been launched almost a month ago. After cracking our heads again with correlating we are now visualising like crazy. At first you would say that this is all about making it look fancy, but there is much more going on behind scenes. A lot of thinking should be done on how a visualisation is more than a nice image, it should display meaningful and actionable information. Every post considers a different discussion about a certain term. Today we are kicking off with: ‘engagement’.

In order to define a way to measure a broad definable term as  ‘engagement’, it should be considered what engagement is for this specific (Last Hijack)  kind of content. What we know for sure is that The Last Hijack is an interactive documentary. But ‘interactive documentary’ is a rather broad term. Therefore we characterise The Last Hijack’s content structure with reference to Sandra Gaudenzi’s interactive documentary genre taxonomie (2009).  She distinguishes four types of interactive documentary; ‘The conversational mode’, ‘experiential mode’, ‘the participatory mode’ and the ‘hyperlink mode’ based on their ‘modes of interaction’. In other words: different interactive structures are the basis for different interactive documentary genre’s. For now we will not go into a detailed description of all of them, but instead dive into the specific mode that concerns the Last Hijack, namely the ‘hyperlink mode’.

The ‘hyperlink mode’ could be best described as a closed video database. The user had an explorative role in the sense that they can navigate through the database by clicking on existing capabilities. The kind of structure encourages the user to not watch the film in a linear, fixed way, but to choose their own path through the story.The closed nature makes it the perfect fashion for the author to control, while leaving the user to decide on how he wants to receive the story. This control of both sides makes this form of  interactive documentary the most commonly used. The Last Hijack consists of one page but there is the possibility to navigate through a timeline below the film and read additional information while watching it. But in essence interactivity is  quite limited; the user can navigate through the structure, but can not create it. The user constructs an individual ‘story’ that consists of the segments which are selected during the navigation process. The larger the database, the greater the chance that there is a unique experience of the story is given. Or in other words that there is been chosen an unique navigational path through the story (Lister et al 22).

Therefore we defined the indicators for an ‘engaged’ user as the following:

1. Great amount of switches  between different videos indicates that a user is actively exploring the content, which corresponds to the aim of the content within ‘hyperlink mode’. Therefore we define the first level of engagement indicator as a lot of different video’s watched.

2. The second level of engagement considers a stronger level of engagement, namely that the user has watched a high number of different video’s AND watched a relatively high percentage of the content of those video’s (the difference between leaving a video halfway and watching it until the end).

3. The most intensive level of engagement for the kind of content Last Hijack considers is the combination of user watching a high number of different videos, watched a relatively high percentage of the content of the video’s AND has switched a lot between perspectives.

   Next time we will discuss ‘popularity of a video’. Talk to you soon!