Third Digital Documentary

Anita Wen-Shin Chang is an artist–scholar who works with various media forms, including film, digital video, photography, installation and the web. Her works have been screened and broadcast internationally and have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Walker Arts Center, Museum of Fine Arts Houston and National Museum of Women. She has received awards from Creative Capital, the Fulbright Program, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and National Geographic All Roads. Her essays have appeared in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, positions: asia critique, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, Taiwan Journal of Indigenous Studies and Teaching Transnational Cinema and Media: Politics and Pedagogy. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at California State University, East Bay.

• CONTENTS: A Discourse of «Image Sovereignty»: Variations on an Ideal/Image of Native Self-Representation – Digital Documentary Praxis – An Essay on Editing – Networked Audio-Visual Culture and New Digital Publics – Documentary and Online Transmediality Toward a Third Digital Documentary.

«This book is a rousing call to a collaborative documentary and transmedia practice that is at once theoretically astute and ethically committed. As she sets out with her partners to preserve linguistic diversity from Taiwan to Hawai‘i, Anita Chang charts a course for community-engaged documentary and transmedia projects that decolonize through the dialogical possibilities of digital media. Third Digital Documentary represents the very best of a growing trend toward the convergence of scholarly, activist, and creative pursuits.» (Alexander L. Fattal, author of Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz)«Chang shifts debate from how we can preserve languages to how we can create new ones – new, digital, interactive ones that will give fresh life to languages imperiled by global forces of homogenization. Her vision, based on her own work, of an online art platform that moves us from passively absorbing information to actively creating embodied knowledge is a crucial demonstration of how activism can adapt new forms of media to progressive goals.» (Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary and Representing Reality)«Chang’s book should be very useful to educators, artists and activists as a guide to building counterpublics that discursively vitalize and revitalize spaces of freedom.» (Lana Lin, director of The Cancer Journals Revisted and author of Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer)«Chang beautifully articulates the uncharted opportunities and perils of working between stations of identity and history. Dually located in Taiwan and Hawai‘i, Third Digital Documentary moves across the terrain of transmedia indigenous theory and praxis. Filmmaker and scholar, Chang champions an ethics of relations informed by a comprehensive engagement with critical practices of feminist film and critical race studies that further trouble the critical territory of post-colonial subjects. The result is a powerful intertwining of indigenous language and cultural analysis in relation to a radical experimental documentary collaboration.» (Beth Coleman, author of Race as Technology and Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation)