Notes from Open Video - Intelligent Television Conference

Karen Colbron, WGBH

Karen talked about their Open Vault project.

It’s an archive of free viewable videos they’ve produced for PBS, such as President Carter on Salt II Treaties and Afghanistan. (1300 videos in total, if I heard her correctly). They have strong social media features such as "people who liked this also liked – euro-strategic missiles" and "Top Picks". They have a keyword search – data is also shown alphabetically by person, and by series. Longer-format interviews are available for purchase.

Jane Johnson – Library of Congress

Jane told us about the LOC's media search tool, mic.llc.com mic.loc.gov(pronounced "Mike"). It’s apparently new at the LOC to be able to limit your search to pull up only moving images. They have an archive directory, advanced search. It’s an outcropping of film, television and video preservation acts taken by congress in the 90’s. They will tell you what videos are available, but from what I could see, you can’t view the videos. I asked a question about this later and, yes, they are not a repository, but in some cases there is a link to view the video.

I did a basic keyword search and saw lots of metadata, such as copyright holder and carrier type, along with this message: "Audio and moving image materials in the collections of the Library of Congress can be reproduced only when all rights and restrictions have been cleared and written authorizations have been obtained. While M/B/RS Reference staff can usually be of some assistance in determining what permissions are required, the onus is on the researcher to obtain them."

They also have an "archive search" that tells you the other archives that hold movies – I got three results using the keyword "New York": The Municipal Archives of the city of New York, the New American Cinema Group, and the Fales Library and special collections.

They can draw on records with certain metadata schemas and export them with different metadata schemas. They have a mapping wizard allowing you to match your "title" with their "title" and then you can import their data. [This feature seems useful for some new kind of mashup, to me. Maybe pull some of this data into Dabble?] The purpose is to incorporate all metadata needed for using the media. It supports non-textual indexing such as facial recognition.

Andrea Kales, The British Film Institute

BFI's got a bunch of stuff going on: Sight and Sound magazine, an archive that they argue is the largest in the world, the London Film Festival, the Gay and Lesbian Film Feestival which started early in the mid-eighties. ScreenOnline.org.uk, for people looking for information about British film and television. They have a new project, funded by the UK’s higher education funding body. The theme of the project is to have a curatorial perspective on moving images, and bring them online to juxtapose them.

They’ve done some co-production with the BBC. Jane showed incredible film footage from what’s got to be 100 years ago. The footage was almost lost. It was a novelty for people to go see at carnivals, made by two men who filmed people with signs saying "come and see yourself later at the carnival." The local films were the most popular thing at the carnival. It’s from a collaboration called "The Mitchell and Kenyon Program" which got 8M viewers - a lot in the UK. The films are beautifully restored and, I’d say, well worth buying.

During the Q&A session after this group, Frank Moretti, host of the conference, brought up a point that got him on the receiving end of a lot of active audience protest and agitation.  He asked, "What about this video is interactive? How do you learn from it?"  Now, I may be paraphrasing him dead wrong, because I'm not sure I understood his question.  So I invite him to comment on this blog with his point in his own words. 

All I can say is to report that the rest of the audience was taken aback - those who spoke up seem to view video as a natural educational material, when taught properly - which means, when teaching the student how to view and interpret the media.  It seemed to some that Dr. Moretti was questioning this point of view, in particular that he was making the point that students are evaluated on their ability to read, write and do math, therefore most of the video we've discussed here is perhaps not relevant to their education.

Of course he's correct that video is inherently one-way media, and video that's not "teaching to the test" won't be that valuable to the test. But once you start tinkering with the video, and teaching about the video, this changes.  You could make the same point about books - "how can people learn from them? They're not interactive!" It would be interesting to continue this discussion on this blog.

After the coffee break, we were treated to a quick demo of dotSub.  The website hosts videos along with their translation, apparently created via a wiki-like process where users can translate from one language to another and others can benefit.  Looks like a really cool tool.

Comments

[Frank Moretti]

Thanks for your response, Isabel. You misunderstand me entirely. I said two things. One was that the educational power of video ultimately requires that those who learn from it in a constructivist and reflective way have to process what they see using the vehicle of language, the ultimate arbiter of intelligent discourse in a democratic society. Thus the provision of content does not represent an educational act in itself. It is only a point of departure. This is no way diminishes the power of video as a primary source of inspiration and thought but for the educator that is only a point of departure. Thoughtful education only occurs as the source is analyzed and subjected to the consideration of others in the medium of language. Video may be a vernacular but it is only understandable to the extent it is translated into words that allow a person to carry the vernacular’s grammar from one video to another. Words once again!!

My second point is that the way education functions is as a system of reproduction; borrowing from Bourdieu and Passeron. from their work Reproduction:

"series of social mediations and processes which tend, behind the backs of the agents engaged in the school system - teachers, students, and their parents - and often against their will, to ensure the transmission of cultural capital with a meritocratic seal of consecration by virtue of the special symbolic potency of the title ( credential).

The most essential mechanisms of education as a reproduction system stem from the way that linguistic and symbolic manipulation are maintained as the way children are sorted and receive their “just” positions in our society. To be absolutely clear I see this as a system rooted in basic forms of injustice defined by history. Societal reform and educational reform have to go hand and hand. For the present, however, if you love a kid, help that kid learn to read, inspire her to read and love the wondrous world of mathematics. Use video to inspire, edify, expand the parameters of vision, provide new possibilities to interrogate anything and everything that the human mind can imagine and create, but please attend to students need to develop their capacity to dialogue and reason about what they see, if you want them to survive schools that helps to make and impose the seemingly “legitimate” exclusions and inclusions which form the basis of the social order.

A final note: CCNMTL’s Havel Project and VITAL, which we are presenting at the conference, try to combine the powerful use of video, most of it produced by our team (not CNN), with a toolkit that requires the analysis and purposeful context of use that a thoughtful curriculum/syllabus provides, in words.

Best

Frank

[Rick Prelinger]

The URL for the MIC project is actually http://mic.loc.gov.

[Isabel Hilborn]

Frank, thank you for that clarification! Rick - duh, of course, .gov. Thank you.