Research Team
This interactive documentary provides a case study of urban change before, during, and
after the 1984 Louisiana World Expoisition in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1986-87, a unix-based
system, allowed the audience rapid, seamless "random access" to 3 hours of video material (through
6 videodisc players) in addition to filmmaker's notes, CVs of major characters, time lines,
and a large number of newspaper articles, legal summaries, and other relevant supporting
documents.
Designed for students of Urban Planning, the system offered simple but usable
video- and text-editing tools, which allowed students to fashion personal reports from the
retrieved materials, add their own notes to the database, and blaze exploratory trails for
others to follow.
The pioneer implementation ran on a UNIX workstation supported
by a bank of video disc players. Key concepts were ported to the Apple Macintosh platform in 1990.
Mackay W; Davenport G (1989).
Virtual Video Editing in Interactive Multi-Media
Communications of the ACM, vol.32, no.7, July 1989, pp.802-10.
Davenport G (1987).
New Orleans in Transition, 1983-1987: The Interactive Delivery of a Cinematic Case Study
The International Congress for Design and Planning Theory, Education Group Conference Proceedings, May.