0.15 A response to the responses of john unsworth and john rink on  (Page 4/7)

Unsworth’s alternative process and our own diverge more dramatically once we have a digital preservation master. From that master we create a lower-quality copy that is much easier to handle than the gigantic preservation master, transcoding the file from 250 Mbps down to 1 or 2 Mbps. A web-based annotation tool is appealing and indeed, we are currently working on such a tool, but at present there are significant technological barriers to such a technology working very well. In our case, we are not dealing with isolated clips of video like those found on YouTube, but rather entire tape transfers that maintain the archival integrity of the original object. Such an object in most cases demands some sort of content segmentation because it is rarely singular in subject matter. Good segmentation requires frame-accurate tools, and this is fairly difficult to manage with video streamed online, which is typically compressed to the point where many of the frames are missing and must be interpolated. This technology will get sorted out, but it is because of these current limitations that we opted for a desktop-based annotation tool when software development began in 2003.

On the issue of crowd-sourcing, we believe that there is a place for unsolicited response, commentary, and analysis from many different quarters. However, I remind Unsworth and others that ethnographic scholars ethically accept a stewardship role of the recordings they make. Unsworth’s critique of academics slipping too easily into elitism is a fair one, but if we look at the models around us—YouTube, or even the Flickr Commons photo collections put up by the Library of Congress and other institutions, there is plenty of evidence for behavior that is reprehensible, wrong, and idiotic. This behavior is annoying within a collection of eighty-year–old photographs, but in a collection of relatively recent ethnographic video, it has the potential to do great damage to personal and professional relationships. For the depositors who function as scholarly mediators, they have a responsibility to moderate and shield individuals who are the subjects of the video from online abuse. Now, it is true that this does sound a bit elitist and perhaps paternalistic, but I feel fairly certain that all of the scholars I have worked with on this project would be upset to see their research collaborators abused or ridiculed in some online venue. On the other hand, the Library of Congress has seen immense benefit from crowd-sourcing metadata for their photos within the Flickr Commons, and the photographs have gotten public use and access that has been educational and creative and well beyond the use they had seen in the past. We believe that the same potential exists for the ethnographic video we are publishing. We believe that the insights and corrections of other scholars and local experts will add greatly to the research and educational value of the material. We welcome this and are working on tools to do so. So we are not opposed to “crowd-sourced” information, but the esoteric nature of much of the content and the sometimes sensitive ethical relationships embedded in the production of the recordings mean that this crowd-sourcing ought to moderated. We also believe that the recordings are the result of a particular subjectivity—that of the scholar and his or her research goals, theoretical orientation, and personal history. It is important that we gather the scholar’s reflections on the recordings they have made so that future viewers will better understand the manner in which they were produced.