News

Dec

MEP receives NEH grant to make archival civil rights footage accessible

Dartmouth College’s Media Ecology Project (MEP) has received Research and Development funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access office to build an accessible collection of newsfilm covering the civil rights movements of the 1950s-1980s. This research will be led by Prof. Mark Williams (Dartmouth Film & Media Studies), an expert in film and media studies, and Dr. John P. Bell (Dartmouth Research Information, Technology and Consulting), an expert on digital curation. Prof. Williams is the director of and Dr. Bell is the associate director for the Media Ecology Project at Dartmouth.

Newsfilm–often shot on site by local television news crews that only broadcast a fraction of what they recorded–is a largely untapped source that captured powerful moments throughout the emotionally-charged American civil rights era. The Accessible Civil Rights Heritage (ACRH) project will develop a test corpus of culturally significant American civil rights newsfilm compiled from moving image archives and regional historical societies across the U.S. ACRH will then explore new cataloging and access procedures that deliver high-quality, meaningful experiences to blind and visually impaired (BVI) users. Participating scholars include Jacqueline Stewart (U Chicago), Matthew Delmont (Dartmouth), and Desirée Garcia (Dartmouth). In addition, MEP will continue previous work with the Virtual Environment and Multimodal Interaction Lab (VEMI Lab) at the University of Maine to assess adaptive technology. … MEP receives NEH grant to make archival civil rights footage accessible

Aug

New version of Waldorf.js video annotation plugin released

MEP is happy to release Waldorf.js v1.2 today. v1.2 adds a navigable annotation index feature and documents previously-dark hooks and callbacks that can be used to customize annotation rendering and display. It also introduces new features supporting integration with host content management systems that allow the host system to pass user identification through Waldorf and use it for annotation attribution.

Waldorf.js v1.2 is being developed as part of MEP’s annotation efforts around a new set of films that cannot be made publicly available due to copyright restrictions. By integrating Waldorf with Dartmouth’s institutional single sign-on system (CAS), MEP can provide a secure environment for small groups of scholars to collaboratively annotate video in a web browser.

For more information on how you can use Waldorf.js and the Semantic Annotation Tool in your own work, see Waldorf’s GitHub page or contact us with questions.

Onomy v1.2 Minimum Viable Annotator example

Jul

MEP Working on International Video Annotation Exchange

CLARIAH

MEP Associate Director John Bell recently spent two days in Amsterdam working with an international team of video annotation experts to help develop a common format supporting data exchange between tools used in a variety of disciplines. The workshop was convened by the Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (CLARIAH), a Dutch program to create distributed research infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. Dr. Bell discussed how MEP’s Semantic Annotation Tool uses the W3C’s Web Annotation (WA) format to transmit and store text and tags and helped map the broad array of tools represented at the workshop to an extended version of the W3C’s standard. … MEP Working on International Video Annotation Exchange

Mar

MEP Collaboration with American Archive of Public Broadcasting

Dartmouth College and The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) are pleased to announce a new collaboration in which AAPB’s Online Reading Room of public television and radio programming will now be accessible through the Media Ecology Project (MEP) at Dartmouth. … MEP Collaboration with American Archive of Public Broadcasting

Jun

Knight Prototype Grant for MEP and Visual Learning Group!

We are delighted to announce that the Knight Foundation has awarded a Prototype Grant for Media Innovation to The Media Ecology Project (MEP) and Prof. Lorenzo Torresani’s Visual Learning Group at Dartmouth, in conjunction with The Internet Archive and the VEMI Lab at The University of Maine. … Knight Prototype Grant for MEP and Visual Learning Group!

Jun

Invited MEP Lecture at University of Basel in relation to new collaborations

Grateful to Prof. Dr. Heiko Schuldt (Computer Science) and Prof. Dr. Lukas Rosenthaler (Digital Humanities Lab) at The University of Basel for inviting and hosting Prof. Mark Williams (Dartmouth College) to present a lecture introducing MEP to Computer Science and Digital Humanities faculty and students in June, 2016.

We are excited to be working with the Databases and Information Systems Research (DBIS) Group that Heiko Schuldt directs, especially regarding the iMotion project that he co-directs, and look forward to future collaborations with The University of Basel’s impressive Digital Humanities Lab that Lukas Rosenthaler directs.

Thanks also to Dr. Claudiu-Ioan Tanase, a member of the Databases and Information Systems Research Group and iMotion team, who helped to organize the event.

Jun

DOMITOR 2016 Conference in Stockholm: Featured MEP Roundtable

Terrific response to our roundtable about developments in The Media Ecology Project as part of the fabulous DOMITOR conference in Stockholm (June 2016). The roundtable especially focused on the pilot study of The Paper Print Collection at The Library of Congress, which involves many DOMITOR scholars. The 2016 conference theme was “Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form: Corporeality and Early Cinema”.

Thanks to Prof. Tami Williams (The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee) and Ph.D. student Allain Daigle (UWM) for participating in the roundtable with Prof. Mark Williams (Dartmouth College).

Look for more MEP news later this summer about a new and historically important resource regarding The Paper Print Collection that was agreed to at DOMITOR 2016!

Jun

MEP Contribution to Fondation Jerome Seydoux-Pathé Archive

Thanks much to Stéphanie Salmon at Fondation Jerome Seydoux-Pathé for utilizing historic archival data that MEP helped to rescue. Proud to have played a role in this important film history data recovery and implementation, a process that began at the DOMITOR conference in 2014.

The data recovered is the work of Paul Spehr and the his late wife Susan Dalton, legendary figures in the film archive world. The rescued information includes significant details about Pathé’s pre-1914 film releases, the period when it was arguably the most prominent and powerful motion picture studio in the world.

Special thanks to Dan Rockmore and The Neukom Institute for their support, and especially Mark Boettcher and Bennett Vance for cracking two locked hard drives and performing the data rescue. We are at work to make a fuller set of the rescued data available as a public resource.

… MEP Contribution to Fondation Jerome Seydoux-Pathé Archive

Jun

Invited Lecture to Introduce MEP at National Library of Singapore, hosted by The Asian Film Archive

Grateful for the invitation from The Asian Film Archive to introduce The Media Ecology Project at this event at The National Library of Singapore in May, 2016.

The enthusiastic and critically engaged audience included Karen Chan, Executive Director of The Asian Film Archive, librarians and technologists from the National Library of Singapore, faculty from The National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and Lai Tee Phang, Director of Audio Visual Archives at The National Archives of Singapore and a member of the National Library Board.

Special thanks to Prof. Kristy Kang (The School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University) for serving as respondent to the lecture by Prof. Mark Williams (Dartmouth College), and for helping to coordinate the event.

Jun

Invited Lecture introducing MEP at Hong Kong Baptist University

Digital Humanities and the Historical Archive Symposium (May 2016)

Grateful to have been invited to deliver a keynote talk about The Media Ecology Project at this exciting Digital Humanities event at Hong Kong Baptist University!

Thanks to Prof. Ian Aitken (HKBU) for this opportunity. Grateful also to Rebekah Wong of the HKBU Library for her work with MEP on the Films Division of India pilot, and especially to Dr. Camille Deprez for her written contributions to that pilot study.