TIME-BASED MEDIA WORKING GROUP:
LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE

Jane Simpson: Facilitator

Group members: Linda Barwick (PARADISEC), Amanda Harris (PARADISEC), Jane Hunter (DSTC), Jane Simpson (University of Sydney Linguistics and various other projects), Michael Walsh (University of Sydney Linguistics and various other projects).

Who is the audience for e-humanities applications of time-based digital media (audio and video)?

A: Makers:

  • people who want to transcribe, time-link and index
  • people who want to preserve stuff (endangered languages people)

B: Users:

  • people who want to use the stuff (look at stuff on the web for example)

What do they want to do with digital audiovisual media?

  • Look at and listen to it
  • Fieldworkers: record events, document language, music, performance (the creative arts), oral histories
  • Creative arts researchers and composers: audio and video output
  • Information gathering for analysis (interviews: oral history etc)
  • Elicitation tools: use of videos, audio for non-verbal elicitation (in psychology and linguistics for example)

  • Once material is digitised, people want to:
  • annotate, segment, 'knowledge layering'
  • search, compare, frequency analysis
  • use it for presentation and publication

Issues for humanities researchers working with digital time-based media

  • Everything changes so fast
  • The audio problem: standards and formats are known, but people don't know how to do it. They need audio archiving, easy-to-use indexing and annotating tools.
  • The video problem: standards and formats are not known. They need video archiving, easy-to-use indexing and annotating tools.
  • The archiving (space) problem for audio and, especially, video.
  • The metadata problem: ideal solution would be an online form flowchart with feedback loops - streamlining and automating it as much as possible
  • Migration of analogue material to digital - probably requires tools so that individual researchers can do it - two levels - archival quality, vs. individual use
  • Migration of packages of multi-media material - Jane Hunter/Andrew Ward have a prototype of software that would do this
  • Security, rights management
  • Tracking the provenance of data
  • Organising material into databases
  • Managing evolution of knowledge - e.g. "dynamic ontologies", "database dynamism"
  • Current funding models for university infrastructure do not encourage cross-institutional collaboration

Summary of discussion

There is a continuum between:

  • (some of) the 90% who are not using computers much. They want easy robust tools that will make their current tasks easier, and that will create things which are long-lasting.
  • the 10% who want to experiment with new ways of doing things. There actually isn't anyone apart from commercial companies who is prepared to look at the easy robust tool side of things. Funding agencies are interested in projects that sound new. Research computing people are also interested in projects that sound new. So they tend to cater for the new and for the future, not for present needs.

What we would like

For the 90% who have not yet taken up e-Humanities possibilities:<

  • current stuff made easy and available and robust
  • solid detailed advice
  • consciousness-raising

For the 10% actively engaged in digital resource creation and use:

  • different needs for advanced stuff that is easy/robust and advanced stuff that is difficult/bleeding edge
  • trouble-shooting
  • website, FAQs, e-mail, if all else fails, ring this number
  • glossaries of technical terms
  • upgrades: software support for maintenance of tools, e.g. useful tools that don't work any more but could be upgraded (e.g. SoundIndex? only works on older Macintoshes, needs to be got up to newer Macs).
  • new tools
  • automatic segmentation
  • automatic information integration [finding other media linked to something]
  • semantic indexing, linking, semantic reasoning
  • database ingestion tools
  • field data management, e.g. integrating GPS to give automatic date and time stamp
  • presentation interface to allow excerpting and downsizing]
  • changes in funding criteria, e.g. recognition of work making something archivable as a research output, and recognition of educational outcomes as valid research output

Jane Hunter's suggestion:

Development of a proposal to APAC (the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing) and DEST (the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training) for a common middleware initiative of collaborative work tools for all the ARC networks, including guidelines, standards, and making robust generic tools (e.g. for annotation, indexation and preservation) that would be useful across the spectrum of social sciences and humanities research. The ARC have funded GRANGENET, equipment, and people networks, but haven't funded software common to those groups. The proposal needs to be built up from consultation with humanities and social science researchers.