William G. Cowan
Software Development Manager
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities
Indiana University
The Annotator’s Workbench is an open source application developed at Indiana University for the segmentation and annotation of digital video. This tool was originally developed to support the Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive (EVIADA), a multi-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Indiana University and the University of Michigan to create online access to hundreds of hours of field work done by ethnographers from around the world. Since the completion of the grant, the project team has found that the technologies developed to support the EVIADA Project can be applied to many different and diverse projects.
The group has worked successfully with the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and the Central American and Mexican Video Archive (CAMVA) to adapt the Annotator’s Workbench to their projects. Currently the team is working with the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM) to preserve and annotate oral histories collected from Yiddish-speaking residents of Eastern Europe and make the material available to scholars, educators and the public. Ethnomusicology Multimedia (EM), a collaborative series of first books in ethnomusicology to be accompanied by a Web-based platform for hosting audio and video materials integral to the authors’ research, published by Indiana University Press, Kent State University Press and Temple University Press, is also making use of the project’s technologies. This presentation will discuss the Annotator’s Workbench and surrounding technology and how it has been used and can be used in a variety of digital video based projects.