AV in DH: How to publish AV research online

Although various tools and functionalities are currently being developed to search, explore, and analyse digital audio-visual sources, this paper will focus on the next step: the question how to publish such Digital Humanities research online. How can Digital Humanities research with audiovisual materials benefit best from the affordances of online publication? This paper will discuss various scenarios for the online publication of Digital Humanities research. It will draw from both existing online publications, by scholars and by media professionals, and scenarios newly developed as part of a university course on doing television history online. The results will then be applied to a selection of proposals within the workshop.
The use of digital material – either digitised or born digital – within Humanities research is increasing, and has initiated a wide range of initiatives to support research and analysis of digital materials, including audio and/or video materials. Contemporary projects include the aggregation of digital collections (e.g. EUscreen, Europeana Newspapers); the development of tools and functionalities for searching and exploring such collections (e.g. AVResearcher, TROVe); and tools to analyse digital materials (e.g. AXES for image recognition). Furthermore, Digital Humanities scholars increasingly use the internet as a platform for dissemination, for instance, through the open access multi-media journal VIEW, the online scholarship platform In Media Res, and Vectors, which operates at the intersection of culture, creativity, and technology. With this in mind, we continue the process and consider the next step: the publication of DH research with AV materials. We address the question how the publication of such research can benefit best from the affordances of the internet. What kind of tools, functionalities, and designs best serve its online publication? To answer such questions, this paper will analyse and discuss various scenarios for the online publication of Digital Humanities research.
The paper will first discuss two existing examples of online publications as best practice examples: the online journals VIEW (http://journal.euscreen.eu) and Vectors (http://vectors.usc.edu). It will then discuss online media projects, as the presentation of interactive narratives is increasingly being developed by filmmakers, media artists, and journalists. Like scholars, these makers publish interactive narratives generally presenting an argument and using a variety of sources and source materials, including videos, documents, and photographs. Examples which are analysed and will be discussed as best practice include the Japanese interactive documentary Soul-Patron (http://www.soul-patron.com), the Dutch television series Na de Bevrijding [After the Liberation] (http://www.nadebevrijding.nl), and The New York Times interactive long read Snow (http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek). While such narratives may not seem the most obvious examples for the online publication of scholarly work, analysing them can be useful to consider how to narrate DH research with AV material, how to navigate various sources of information, and how contextualize such research narratives.
The EUscreen project aggregates archive materials, mostly in the form of videos, of European broadcasters, and makes these available for the general audience as well as for teachers and researchers. One of the challenges the project is currently facing is the development of tools and functionalities to provide context for these materials. Within the framework of the EUscreenXL project (2013-2016), ways to publish research including EUscreen materials are being investigated. The second part of the paper will discuss scenarios newly developed by students within a course using EUscreen. In Spring 2014, a group of 27 bachelor students at Utrecht University participated in a course on Dutch television culture conducted by Sonja de Leeuw, Eggo Müller, Berber Hagedoorn and Willemien Sanders. Students were required to research Dutch television history in an international context using the portal EUscreen and other online archives and collections, such as Academia (provided by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), Open Images, as well as YouTube. Moreover, they were assigned to develop scenarios for the online publication of their research and to write a research paper accounting for the development of their scenarios and designs. For example, some students developed a timeline as the structuring device for the narrative, some used geographical mapping as the main point of entry, whilst others used the idea of an online museum with various exhibition rooms as a narrative structure. A number of the scenarios developed in the course will be discussed as best practice examples.
The various examples of online publications including AV materials discussed above will inform the distillation of a number of prototypical formats for publishing Digital Humanities research online.
In the last part of paper the findings of the analysis of various publications discussed will be applied to a selection of the proposals within the workshop, focusing on the ways to narrate research, ways to navigate sources, and ways to contextualize the narrative. The results will be discussed and will subsequently inform the development of publication formats and related tools and functionalities, for publishing DH research including AV materials online within the framework of the EUscreen project (http://www.euscreen.eu).