0.13 Evia, sustainability, and mission-creep  (Page 2/3)

EVIA was funded as a stand-alone project from 2001 to 2009 with $2.5 million from Mellon and $1.5 million in match from Indiana and Michigan. As someone in the Burdette paper admits, “The EVIA Project has been an expensive endeavor by humanities project standards. Much of this support went towards software development. . . . Our software will need to be maintained at least, and of course, we have many ideas for extending and improving it” (203). While much of EVIA’s $4 million in funding was going to software development, the project managed to complete ingestion of only seventy hours of video. That’s ten hours a year, or about one hour a month. Granted, there are 1200 more hours in the pipeline, but at the currently established rate of completion, that 1200 hours will take about 118 years to ingest. What slows things down to this rate? Perhaps it is the activity of annotation and the related activity of peer review:

Annotation involves taking an assembled corpus of unedited video files, segmenting it using a three-level hierarchical scheme, and annotating each segment. Annotation also typically includes developing a lengthy glossary, citations, and transcriptions. When given the tools, scholars were annotating their recordings in much more detail than we originally anticipated. As a response we recognized that we had to provide scholarly credit for the kind of work they were doing and that implied implementing some kind of peer review. . . . Once a collection is completed, a designated editor evaluates it with assistance from a managing editor, and if acceptable, suitable peer reviewers are found and the project is sent for review. Usually, there are some small changes that the author will be required to make as part of the peer review dialog and once those changes are complete, we send the project to be copy-edited. Some of these collections contain annotations that are equivalent in length to a small monograph. (192-3)

Well, no wonder it’s hard to move video through that pipeline. I can understand how this happens, of course: one thing leads to another. You want to preserve video, but to preserve it you have to collect it, and to collect it some ethnographer has to give it to you. When she does, you also need her to give you some descriptive metadata. She will need some kind of tool to do that, and as you develop that tool, you realize that you could go further, and allow ethnographers to embed notes about the subject matter into the video record itself—but once you put that tool in the hands of the ethnographers, it turns out they have lots and lots to say, so much, in fact, that they can’t justify their level of effort unless the results count for tenure and promotion, so now you need to implement a peer-review and publishing process in order to provide them with professional credit. The only problem is that lately your rate of accessioning video has slowed to a crawl, between the tool development, the endless annotations, and building a peer-review and publishing operation. But tool development is more fundable than preservation because it seems more finite (even though it isn’t), and publishing could provide some income that would help to make the preservation activity sustainable (though it probably won’t), and day by day the preservation activities just seem to get pushed to the back burner, always with the best of intentions.