VidArch at SILS

The VidArch Project

The VidArch project builds on earlier work with digital video files and their surrogates, seeking ways in which to preserve a video work's context and highlighting its essence, thus making it more understandable and accessible to future generations. This project will focus on developing a preservation framework for digital video context by applying it to two important digital video collections: the complete series of NASA broadcast educational videos and the complete set of juried ACM SIGCHI videos presented at annual conferences from 1983 to the present.

The project will address the important context aspect of digital preservation on both theoretical and practical fronts, which should improve archival decision-making and finding-aid creation and suggest ways to leverage technology further to make them more efficient and effective.

Some of the project's current focus is on the US Presidential Election of 2008. The list of current YouTube queries is located here and the list of Blogosphere queries is here.

Project Papers and Reports

  • Chirag Shah (2008). YouTube Crawling: A VidArch Year in Retrospect. (Project Report, 352KB pdf)
  • Robert Capra, Christopher A. Lee, Gary Marchionini, Terrell Russell, Chirag Shah, and Fred Stutzman (2008). Selection and Context Scoping for Digital Video Collections: An Investigation of YouTube and Blogs. JCDL 2008.
  • Chirag Shah and Gary Marchionini (2008). Hunting for Hip, Hipsters, and Happenings on YouTube. To appear at ASIST 2008.
  • Chirag Shah (2008). TubeKit - A Query-based YouTube Crawling Toolkit. Demo appeared at JCDL 2008.
  • Gary Marchionini, Helen Tibbo, Chirag Shah, Christopher A. Lee (2007). Telling the Whole Story: Selecting and Collecting Web-Based Videos for Archival Collections. Poster in the proceedings of Digital Curation Conference (DCC). Washington DC, USA. December 11-13, 2007.
  • Chirag Shah and Gary Marchionini (2007). Capturing Relevant Information for Digital Curation. JCDL 2007 Conference Poster. In Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Digital Libraries (Vancouver, BC, Canada, June 18 - 23, 2007). JCDL '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 496-496. (Poster, 118KB pdf)
  • Chirag Shah and Gary Marchionini (2007). ContextMiner: A Tool for Digital Library Curators. JCDL 2007 Conference Demo. In Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Digital Libraries (Vancouver, BC, Canada, June 18 - 23, 2007). JCDL '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 514-514. (Demo, 512KB pdf)
  • Chirag Shah and Gary Marchionini (2007). Preserving 2008 US Presidential Election Videos. Paper at the 7th International Workshop on Web Archiving and Digital Preservation (IWAW'07). (Paper, 214KB pdf)
  • Chirag Shah and Gary Marchionini. DiscoverInfo: A Tool for Discovering Information with Relevance and Novelty. Demo to appear in SIGIR 2007.
  • Helen R. Tibbo, Christopher A. Lee, Gary Marchionini, Dawne Howard. VidArch: Preserving Meaning of Digital Video over Time through Creating and Capture of Contextual Documentation. IS&T Archiving 2006. (Paper, 360KB pdf)
  • Helen R. Tibbo. Preserving Video Objects and Context: A Demonstration Project. IS&T Archiving 2006. (Slides, 1.3MB ppt)
  • Christopher A. Lee, Helen R. Tibbo, Dawne Howard, Yaxiao Song, Terrell Russell. Keeping the Context: An Investigation in Preserving Collections of Digital Video. IEEE ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2006). (Paper, 136KB pdf)
  • Helen R. Tibbo. Preserving Video Objects and Context: A Demonstration Project. IEEE ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2006). (Slides, 1.0MB ppt)
  • Finding Aid - Videos from Conference Proceedings, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 1983-2003
  • Finding Aid - NASA K-16 Science Education Programs Videos, 1998-2005

Demos

  • ContextMiner - Demo

    ContextMiner is a simple and intuitive interface for a digital library curator. It is meant to help the curator in collecting metadata and contextual information for a digital object to be preserved.

  • DiscoverInfo - Demo

    DiscoverInfo is a tool to explore a collection of documents using searching with a typical search-engine-like interface, browsing with term-clouds, and discovering new information with the help of novelty visualization for documents.

  • DIToolkit - Demo

    Using DIToolkit, one can automate the creation of interfaces such as the one shown in the DiscoverInfo demo. DIToolkit enables one to point to a website, get a crawl of it, index the documents (text, html, pdf), and provide searching and browsing capabilities that include relevance ranking and a novelty grid.

  • TubeKit - Demo

    TubeKit is a toolkit for creating YouTube crawlers. It allows one to build one's own crawler that can crawl YouTube based on a set of seed queries and collect up to 24 different attributes. TubeKit assists in all the phases of this process starting with database creation to finally giving access to the collected data via browsing and searching interfaces.