Posts Tagged ‘research’

  • 28 Apr

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    Digital Video for Research and Teaching: Annotating, Accessing, Archiving

    2

    I have worked on several projects involving digital video and audio based on field work, collected by ethnographers and oral historians. And while at times this material can be compelling, for the most part, these academics are not film makers. So often there is not a story to be told. It is the ritual or the musical performance or the language that needs to be described. And often the most straight forward way to do that is through annotation. But annotation is a time consuming process. Segmenting and annotating several hours of video can take several weeks.

    And when the annotation is complete, how do you get this annotated video to your colleagues, your students, your department head? Most of the faculty that I have worked with are extremely interested in sharing their research with their students. But streaming video requires more infrastructure than the average academic either possesses or wants to have to deal with. And the skills necessary to make both the video and the annotations available online are also of little interest. So why not YouTube? From what I can see most online services have limited metadata and limited file size. Consequently, it is difficult to place the small segments you upload into the context of a larger research project.

    And, especially if you have started with analog materials, while you are digitizing, you might as well make the best copy you can. Uncompressed seems to be the way to go and while the price of disk storage is low, an hour of uncompressed video is at least 100 gigs or more if it’s HD. And then add on top of this all the other issues with creating and maintaining the metadata for your archived materials.

    So creating, using and storing digital video in an academic research environment is not as simple as it may seem. You need tools to do the segmentation and annotation. An infrastructure to support streaming digital video and displaying corresponding annotation. And large amounts of disk storage.

    At various times I have thought that I had the answers to the problem of digital video in the academy. I am less sure of myself now. But I think there is a lot to discuss. And I keep thinking there is a solution out there.

  • 19 Apr

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    Embracing the multi-dimensionality of digital resources

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    Similar to some of the other posts that have popped up recently, my current work focuses on the impacts of digital resources in the classroom. Specifically (in my ongoing project), I’m interested in how students learn new languages when curricula incorporate a variety of multimedia tools developed specifically for students. This is especially interesting for nontraditional or endangered languages that do not command market development of resources for educators. These educators create resources to teach their students, but which also function as cultural artifacts of underrepresented languages.

    I’m also interested in the larger implications of putting these resources online for use by a wider audience. I’d love to talk with other THATCampers who create and use Open Educational Resources or other born-digital materials in their classroom. Can digital resources help bridge the gap between teaching, research, and collaboration online? How can we assess the long-term value of these materials and ensure their preservation into the future?

    More generally, I just wanted to say how excited I am for what I know will be an amazing experience. I can’t wait to meet everyone and discuss all of the exciting topics I’ve been reading about!

  • 19 Apr

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    Facilitating a Rhetoric of Collaboration: A Resource for Learning/Teaching Research

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    I’ve been browsing through people’s posts so far and I’m particularly interested in those that deal with online archives for teaching and research (for example, this and this), as I think they relate closely to the project described below.

    I’m currently working on a web-based project of thematically-organized collections of link sources pertaining to contemporary cultural issues. The purpose of this site is to serve as a learning and teaching resource for college-level writing students and instructors. Moreover, it aims to facilitate a more collaborative understanding of how writing, research, and knowledge-making happens through an interface that enables user-contributed links as well as user participation across institutional and geographical boundaries; through this project, users will be encouraged to freely draw from others’ work, work together to build bodies of knowledge, and add to larger ongoing conversations pertinent to those bodies of knowledge.

    This project draws on the layout of Wikipedia in that its content will be driven primarily by user-contribution of links to news articles, scholarly articles, blogs, and other online media, which will be arranged by individual pages pertaining to specific topics, to which users can follow, or subscribe. Unlike Wikipedia, however, the site will not include a narrative accompanying the citations; the primary resource that this website will provide will be the links to sources aggregated around specific issues, encouraging students and other users to formulate their own narratives from the media sources provided. In this help site way, individual pages will put links to articles, blogs, and other kinds of pieces of a larger conversation into dialogue with one another. I’m currently thinking to begin with the content domain of intellectual property, which might include pages on: history of intellectual property, copyright/copyleft, remix, read-write culture, plagiarism, fair use, torrent communities, piracy, authorship/ownership, design imitation in fashion, and intellectual property across cultures. I’m interested in talking through the kinks of this project, especially with others who are working on structurally similar things.

    I’ve also been seeing a bunch of articles lately discussing the difficulties/ethical implications of user-generated content, which I think could be interesting to address.