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The Active and the Interactive: Discourse in Interactive visual Narratives


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Creator/Artist: Krishna Kumar Radhakrishnan

Category: Thesis

Batch: 2024

Source: India,   IDC IIT Bombay

Period:  2019-onwards

Medium: Thesis pdf

Supervisor: Prof. Ravi Poovaiah


Detailed Description

An Interactive Visual Narrative (henceforth IVN) is a form of visual storytelling where the mode of narration is interactive in nature. In this form, the audience’s role changes to that of a participant, collaborator, and co-creator of the narrative. The focus of the study is from the vantage point of a designer into the dynamics of discourse production in IVNs. It tries to address their prime concerns, the level and nature of interactivity to be provided to the participants to facilitate the production of an engaging narrative. Scholars have conducted research in distinct genres with various agendas. The scholars have not adequately borrowed methodologies from each other. Hence, the methods of investigation for these studies and the outcomes are disparate. In this thesis, we relook at the mechanics of discourse production in IVN by situating IVN as a universally existent phenomenon. The enhanced approach to the study is at a structural level, focusing on discourse production in IVNs. The proposal examines the ‘order of presentation’ and the ‘order of telling.’ There is a change in focus from ‘a content–presentation-oriented approach to a content–presentation–telling approach,’ which we designate as a deficit in previous research and theories relating to IVNs. Formulating the elements that make the structure, their function, and the IVN model will facilitate the encapsulation of the obscure mechanism of discourse production in IVNs. We devised an IVN Analysis Tool to systematically capture the elements and illuminate their function in the overall IVN structure. The composition of the narrative units was designated to facilitate the understanding of discourse production, the mapping of elements that provided interactivity, and its implication on the discourse.