Applied Communication - Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT)
Note: This is an abstract only and it refers to a more
complex audiovisual essay that will form the heart of this ‘paper’. A early version of such a work (which forms part of a different networked videographic essay) is available to be viewed if necessary. It is an archive (http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/downloads/ACH06.zip) which requires QuickTime 7.x or better, to view and is 10MB in total size. I provide this to give some indication of the sort of work that will be written and presented for this paper.
The SMIL Annotation Film Engine (presented at Digital Resources in the Humanities 2002) was a middle scale computing humanities project that sought to combine a real time video stream, an idiosyncratic
metadata scheme, and the annotation and presentation affordances of SMIL.
The first version of this project “Searching”, was based on John Ford’s 1956 western _The Searchers_ and a
metadata scheme was defined from a hermeneutic claim, that “doorways in _The Searchers_ represent liminal
zones between spaces that are qualities”. Doors, as they appear in the film, were encoded around a small data set (camera is inside, outside, or between, and is looking
inside, outside, or between) and still images from the film are provided. A search by a user yields all the stills that meet the search criteria, and clicking on any still loads the appropriate sequence from the film for viewing in its cinematic context.
As I argued in 2002, “Searching” operated as a ‘discovery engine’ rather than a metadata archival project, so what it developed in the engine is a process for the unveiling of patterns of meaning, and this would seem to offer an
engaged middle ground for distributed humanities content
that provides access to material while also foregrounding an applied critical or interpretive activity. Since 2002 such idiosyncratic data schemes have emerged via social software as folksonomies, and I have adopted the implications of this earlier project to develop a series of interactive video ‘sketches’ that foreground and explore the implications of a critical videographic essay practice. This is the writing of video, sound, text, and image into audiovisual knowledge objects that are porous to the
contemporary network. These works have implications for new media and humanities pedagogy, as they offer a possible heuristic for teaching and learning that is between
the traditional essay and the ‘interactive’ (whether online or CDROM hardly matters) reference work.
These sketches are academic works that aim to reverse the usual hierarchy (and ideology) of relations between
text and image that exists in academic research by
allowing video and sound to ‘drive’ the writing (and vice versa). The model proposed allows academics or
students to write their own interactive video based essays that are multilinear, academically sound, and network appropriate.
The work has implications for humanities disciplines that study time and image based media, new media theory,
and contemporary multimedia pedagogies, and the
‘paper’ will be such an ‘networked knowledge object’.
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Complete
Hosted at Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV (Paris-Sorbonne University)
Paris, France
July 5, 2006 - July 9, 2006
151 works by 245 authors indexed
The effort to establish ADHO began in Tuebingen, at the ALLC/ACH conference in 2002: a Steering Committee was appointed at the ALLC/ACH meeting in 2004, in Gothenburg, Sweden. At the 2005 meeting in Victoria, the executive committees of the ACH and ALLC approved the governance and conference protocols and nominated their first representatives to the ‘official’ ADHO Steering Committee and various ADHO standing committees. The 2006 conference was the first Digital Humanities conference.
Conference website: http://www.allc-ach2006.colloques.paris-sorbonne.fr/