Snow Fall and A Short History of the Highrise: two interactive communication models from The New York Times

Abstract

This paper analyses the discursive characteristics of New York Times’ awarded interactive features Snow Fall and A Short History of the Highrise. These projects allow us to state the maturity of two models of interactive discourse which, despite representing two different approaches, share a series of common features such as the immersive effect. Snow Fall is a paradigmatic example of the use of parallax scrolling in webdoc design. The video-based work A Short History of the Highrise represents a remarkable example of an interactive documentary developed by the NYT and the National Film Board of Canada. The analysis uses the ‘interactive decoupage,’ a framework developed by the authors for the study of interactive audiovisual work. This tool was recently presented at the IV Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Española de Investigación de la Comunicación AE-IC 2014 and at the 2014 issue of Hipertext.net