Talk Session: Digital Video in Research and Teaching

I am interested in discussing the use of digital video in research and teaching. I believe that the current options available for digital video on the web do not meet the needs of researchers and instructors. for the most part most digital video on the web expects you to start at the beginning of the video and play to the end without many options. I think to use digital video effectively for research and teaching, you need to be able to:

1. Segment and annotate video

2. Play back a segment (and only that segment of video) with it’s annotation

3. Be able to present video segments in the broader context of the entire video

4. Enable community commentary on that video segment, whether that community is a group of students in a class, the general public or a learned group of colleagues.

5. The ability to provide transcriptions of the digital video with the annotation. That transcription can also come from the types of communities mentioned above.

To this end, I received a startup grant from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities for a plugin to Omeka that provides the majority of requirements above (commentary and transcription need some additional work). That plugin is now publicly available at www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/omeka2/ for those who are interested. To look at using digital video for research see www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/oufinopo/ for a framework I developed with Richard Edwards at Ball State for studying 20 public domain films noir that we had hoped would be used for a MOOC he was teaching.

I would hope this session would be a discussion of the general issues of using video for research and teaching with a discussion of successes and failures in that process. And not only in traditional classroom settings but also using video in MOOCs and other community based projects.

Categories: MOOCs, Open Access, Session Proposals, Session: Talk, Teaching, Visualization |

About William Cowan

I have about 20 years of enterprise system development both in the private sector and at Indiana University. I have extensive experience working with relational databases, working as a database administrator and/or managing database administrators at Millipore Corporation in Massachusetts and Alexsis Corporation and Proquest Corporation in Michigan. In addition at Proquest, I managed the business systems staff of about 30 members including developers, system designers, system architects, DBA’s and System Administrators. At Indiana University, I have been the project manager and system architect for several successful projects including Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis, a multi-year Mellon funded project, and the Ethnomusicalogy Multimedia project with Indiana University Press and Temple University Press, as well as leading development in the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities in the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. I am currently the Associate Director of Software Development Digital Libraries managing multiple projects and a development team of 6 to 8 systems analyst. I am also the principal investigator for an NEH Office of Digital Humanities start-up grant to create a video annotation plugin for Omeka that will allow the display of video segments plus annotation in Omeka and Omeka exhibits.