While I am perfectly willing to discuss broader digital video issues, I would like to focus on adding video segments and annotation to Omeka, specifically Omeka Exhibits. I feel that rather than putting the burden of video editing, that is finding and cutting all the video segments you want to use from say a two hour interview, on the creator of the video in order to upload those segments individually as Omeka items to get the highlights or often the significant parts of the video online is not the best approach. I am proposing that we allow access to the entire video but that we can segment and annotate that video in a separate tool, in this case the Annotator’s Workbench (AWB), an open source, Java tool that allows the segmentation and annotation of video files, producing an xml file that contains this information. I then want to upload that xml file as a set of Omeka items that are based on the segments and annotations I created in the AWB. I should then be able to use those video segments and annotations as items in an exhibit without having to create a bunch of individual video files. I have done some work with this and would like to show everyone where the project stands and get input on whether such a plugin is valuable and how it might be improved.
What digital video segmentation and annotation might look like in Omeka
I might add that I have a NEH ODH start-up grant to work on this project so this session can have some direct impact on how such a plugin would be built.
Students in my Museum Informatics class have been interested in adding video to their collections/exhibits. I think some of them are a little surprised that Omeka doesn’t work like Facebook, which imports an embedded video. There is some discussion of this on the Omeka forums, but it doesn’t seem like a plug-in for this has ever happened. (see omeka.org/forums/topic/youtube-embedding-technical-constraints).
AWB seems more powerful than they’d need at the moment, but adding a plus for a session on video in Omeka.