Interactive and Transmedia Documentary: Production, Interface, Content and Representation Jorge Vázquez-Herrero and Arnau Gifreu-Castells Abstract In recent years the way we produce new media has changed dramatically. Interactive nonfiction narratives have transformed the processes of producing, dis- tributing and showing documentaries, and especially the processes involved in how the viewer relates to the text. One of these new media forms of narrative expres- sion is “interactive documentary”. In this work, first, we explore the evolution of the documentary genre as an expression form, then we analyse the current state of development of the interactive documentary. Second, we analyse five representa- tive projects from different critical perspectives: production, interface, content and modalities of representation. Finally, we outline a set of issues that emerged from the analysis performed that need to be resolved. Keywords Interactive documentary · Transmedia documentary · Webdoc Comparative analysis · Nonfiction · Digital storytelling 1 Introduction As a new media object, interactive documentary challenges traditional methods of study and dissemination. Textual analysis, which has been a key method of docu- mentary research since the 1970s, becomes difficult when there are several potential ways of relating to the documentary text. This new phenomenon needs to be studied from global, multidimensional and complementary perspectives, taking into account, for example, aesthetics, economics, sociology, technology, etc. This work analyses a series of interactive documentary projects developed dur- ing the representative period of 2010 to 2014 from different perspectives. Projects J. Vázquez-Herrero (B ) Faculty of Communication Sciences, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, A Coruña, Spain e-mail: jorge.vazquez@usc.es A. Gifreu-Castells ERAM - University of Girona, Salt, Spain e-mail: arnau.gifreu@eram.cat © Springer International Publishing AG 2019 M. Túñez-López et al. (eds.), Communication: Innovation & Quality, Studies in Systems, Decision and Control 154, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91860-0_8 113