Exploring the ‘craftedness’ of multimedia narratives: from creation to interpretation

This paper emerges from a comparative study of two community-based multimedia storytelling projects in Toronto and Montreal, and the multimedia narratives participants produced in those projects. Following current scholarship in visual methods that acknowledges the significance for research of the medium’s formal qualities, the authors offer the concept of ‘craftedness’ as one which might help researchers grapple with the significance of the processes of both creating and interpreting visual data. Through a study of the visual data produced in these two projects, they examine three qualities of this aesthetic experience captured in the notion of craftedness, which seem to both complicate and enable processes of self-representation and interpretation: aesthetic distance, visual excess and the visualisation of the unrepresentable. Taking seriously the craftedness of multimedia works highlights the complexities of interpreting visual data and the dilemmas of representing ourselves and others.