ASIS&T Virtual Symposium on Information & Technology in the Arts and Humanities, April 9, 2018

1. ARCHIVAL ACCESS
ONLINE, BORN-
NETWORKED
SCHOLARSHIP
ASIS&T Virtual Symposium on
Information & Technology in the Arts
and Humanities, April 9, 2018
Mark J Williams • mark.j.williams@dartmouth.edu • @markj2
John P Bell• john.p.bell@dartmouth.edu • @nmdjohn

2. OVERVIEW ESSAY ON MEP

3. MEP IS A PARTNERSHIP
Content Scholarship Technology
…and many more!
The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture

4. LINKED DATA INFO ECOLOGY

5. MEP GOALS
• Realize a sustainability project regarding at-risk media
• Develop networked scholarship in relation to online archival content
• Promote and augment the dynamic ecology of historical media
• Support essential work of archives RE the public sphere and memory
• Engage primary research, new research questions across
disciplines
• Innovate dynamic new forms of scholarship and publication

6. MEP CONTEXT AND PREMISES
• Adding value back to archives and libraries
• Realizing a virtuous cycle of access, scholarship, preservation
• Scholars and academics make archive materials more searchable
• Scholars make materials more searchable across participating
archives
• Scholars can even become part of archival workflow
• Best first users of the digitized materials will be provided access
• Can offer advice and advocacy about what to digitize next and
why

7. • Rare early cinema Paper Print
collection from the Library of
Congress
• Collaborative markup of
performance analysis, examining
transition from 19th C stage
codified gestures to development of
motion picture acting
• Exporting annotations for analysis
and data visualization is a key
research goal
USE CASE: GESTURE ANALYSIS

8. USE CASE: SEARCHABLE
SEGMENTS
• In the Life – Historic public
television program that assayed
gay and lesbian life in the United
States, contemporaneous to rise of
the AIDS crisis
• Program segments annotated to
create time-based metadata, text
descriptions, recurring themes,
appearances, and tags.

9. SEMANTIC ANNOTATION TOOL

10. USE CASE: MACHINE VISION
• Historic educational films curated
from the Internet Archive
• Machine-generated object and
action tags to assist in search and
discovery
• Manual annotation tool for algorithm
training, especially for human
validation of algorithm results
• Second key feature will be a study
into use of time-based annotations
as a mechanism for BLV
accessibility

11. MACHINE VISION WORKFLOW

12. NEW MEP PILOTS: USIA FILMS
• US Information Agency comparable
in output to major motion picture
studios (18,000 films during Cold
War)
• Films distributed and screened
outside the U.S. – largely ignored
as critical component of foreign
policy strategies
• Developing participation of scholars
and students within and outside the
U.S.
• Major initiative with The National
Archives and Records
Administration

13. CIVIL RIGHTS NEWSFILM (CRN)

14. CIVIL RIGHTS NEWSFILM (CRN)
• Engage scholars, students to create
newly annotated collection of television
newsfilm from multiple archives 1950-
1980
• Research focus: civil rights and social
justice
• Build upon important local-national
model of American Archive of Public
Broadcasting
• Collaborative, networked research

15. CIVIL RIGHTS NEWSFILM (CRN)

16. APPLICATIONS
Classroom annotation environment
Semantic web publishing platform
Collaborative vocabulary builder
Accessible annotation plugin and server
Machine object and action recognition

17. LANGUAGES
Python/Django
PHP/CodeIgniter
PHP/Kohana*
Ruby on Rails, sqlite, jQuery, Babel
Python

18. PORTABLE METADATA
DC: Descriptive metadata and media ID
FOAF: Contributors
SKOS: Shared vocabularies
OA: Time-based open annotations
RDF: Encoding (XML and JSON)

19. SEMANTIC ANNOTATION TOOL

20. SEMANTIC ANNOTATION TOOL
Waldorf.js
• jQuery plugin
• Annotation interface
• Merges annotations,
vocabularies, and video
in browser
Statler
• Ruby on Rails
• Annotation aggregator
• API-based interactions
• W3C Web Annotation
compliant

21. ANNOTATION JSON

22. WALDORF.JS INTEGRATION

23. WALDORF.JS & STATLER
Interface
jQuery plugin wraps videos on
page with annotation interface
• Time and geometry delimited
annotations
• Meant for integration with other
research and CMS tools
(scope!)
• Designed for accessibility and
screen reader compatibility

24. WALDORF.JS & STATLER
Features
• Add annotation to an existing
page with only a few lines of
Javascript
• Suggest tags loaded from
external vocabulary files
(onomy.org)
• Identify annotation authors by
email address
• Identify videos by URI–we only
host the annotations

25. WORKFLOW
Statler
Waldorf.j
s

26. Links
Waldorf.js
http://dartgo.org/mep-
waldorf
Statler http://dartgo.org/mep-statler
Mediathread http://mediathread.info
Scalar http://scalar.me
Mark J Williams • mark.j.williams@dartmouth.edu • @markj2
John P Bell• john.p.bell@dartmouth.edu • @nmdjohn