Seth Keen

Found this in my inbox sent by email from Dr Strangelove who has a blog called ‘Watching YouTube’ on which he has collated over 270 academic articles on the video-sharing website. Included in this bibliography is a list of articles on tagging and taxonomy subjects related to YouTube. From the bibliography list:

Taxonomy/Search/Tagging

Crane, Riley, and Didier Sornette. ‘Viral, Quality, and Junk Videos on YouTube: Separating Content From Noise in an Information-Rich Environment.’ In Proceedings of AAAI symposium on Social Information Processing, 2008.

Ding, Ying, Ioan Tom, Sin-Jae Kang, Zhixiong Zhang, and Michael Fried. ‘Mediating and Analyzing Social Data.’ In Proceedings, Part II, On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems, OTM 2008 Confederated International Conferences, Monterrey, Mexico, 9–14 November 2008.

Geisler, Gary, and Sam Burns. ‘Tagging Video: Conventions and Strategies of the YouTube Community.’ In Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Vancouver, BC, 18–23 June 2007.

Lin, Wei-Hao, and Alexander Hauptmann. ‘Identifying Ideological Perspectives of Web Videos Using Folksonomies.’ Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fall Symposium Series Papers, Menlo Park, CA, 2008.

Paolillo, John C. ‘Structure and Network in the YouTube Core.’ In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 7 January 2008.

Ulges, Adrian, Christian Schulze, Daniel Keysers, and Thomas M. Breuel. ‘A System That Learns to Tag Videos by Watching YouTube.’ In Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 415–24. Berlin: Springer, 2008.

Picked this link up off AM’s blog, 5 Trends That Will Change Media in ’09 and was particualry interested in the concept of curation economy:

1. The Growth of the Curation Economy

As the cost of the creation of content continues to come down, more content creators will come online. This will create a huge influx of unfiltered material, and create a significant demand for filters and editors who can find/sort/select and recommend contextual quality content within verticals. This “Curation” function has the potential to give media enterprises whose current business models are under tremendous pressure a new and important role in the web media world. What makes the Curation Economy so powerful, and so disruptive, is that the core resource required to building a high-quality curated experience is not capital, but knowledge. This will drive an emerging class of content entrepreneurs – people who are able to turn their trusted personal brands into high-quality filtered content destinations. As the number of publishers grows dramatically, content consumers will hunger for new trusted sources. These many creators and consumers on the move will fuel whole new businesses and categories.

The ‘Towards Open and Dynamic Archives‘ is project that Stoffel Debuysere.

The traditional functioning of audiovisual archives is being completely reshaped by today’s technological advancements. The expansion of fast broadband networks and the availability of software, hardware and recording equipment have broken down the barriers to the production and distribution of audiovisual content. Large quantities of multimedia materials are flowing on the Internet and into the archives every day, and all over the world ambitious projects are set up to digitalise heritage collections. Moreover, media start to look more collective and inclusive: the ubiquitous “Web 2.0″ discourse promises new levels of participatory culture in which all users are producers, sharing, appropriating and remixing content, overcoming the old regime of top-down broadcast media. Blogs, wikis, social networks and “user-generated-content” tools are presented as the new wave of voluntary alliances that users seek online. Even the traditional media are swept away into the hype: the BBC designated 2005 as the “Year of the Digital Citizen”, in 2006 Time magazine chose “You” as the as its esteemed Person of the Year.

Today, I had a moment to read the introductory essay ‘Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument’, by Okwui Enwezor in the book Okwui Enwezor, ‘Archive Fever, Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art’, International Center of Photography:New York, Steidl: Gottingen, 2008.

The aim is not to produce a theory of the archive but to show ways in which the archival documents, information gathering and data-driven analysis, the contradictions of master narratives, the inventions of counter archives and thus counter-narratives, the projection of the social imagination into sites of testimony, witnessing, and more inform the practices of contemporary art. p. 22

…as part of the a broad culture of sampling, sharing, and recombining of visual data in infinite calibrations of users and receivers. We are fundamentally concerned with the overlay of the iconographic, taxonomic, indexical, typological, and archaeological means by which artists generate new historical as well as analytical readings of the archive. p. 23

Some of the references I noted in this essay:

Books
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
W.J.T Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

MIT Press Journals
Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, October, Fall 2004, Vol. -, No. , Pages 3-22

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/0162287042379847

One perspective from the mediamatic website titled Select and Combine, The Rise of Database Narratives

Database narrative refers to narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories, Kinder explains, particular data – characters, images, sounds, events – are selected from a series of databases or paradigms, which are then combined to generate specific tales.

The BBC Innovation Labs 2007 covers amongst other things some valid questions on online documentary production. Note ‘UGC’ is an acronym for User-Generated Content.

Cross Platform Documentary: The growth of social media services had led to an explosion of new and innovative ways of realising and delivering documentary online. How can films be made, presented, shared, augmented, annotated, located, classified and discovered using these new tools? What impact does this have on the craft of documentary and what models should be explored in the future? How can we discover what constitutes documentary in the digital space? Does it have to be ‘snackable’? Can it be modular and episodic? Is it possible to be an auteur and simultaneouslly incorporate UGC content?

In the last few weeks I have been planning out an approach towards the videodefunct video database project. Initally, I imagined developing one-off video objects that provided a critique of the video-sharing site YouTube. The idea was to explore in each of these objects, both a formal and cultural critique. This means the works would aim to experiment both with form and content as part of examining video as a form beyond single-channel closed objects, like the hardcopy output approach of television programs, or even a cinematic edit going to a locked-off film print. A video form that as dicussed in the post on ipod video, is more responsive to the properties of the Internet as a network. Then a light bulb went off in regards to a blog as a form of a video database. Instead of placing the emphasis on a single video object, what happens if each uploaded video is seen as being a part of a larger whole, the database? The focus shifts to taxomony and folksonomy. In the short term an initial experiment using the customised version of WordPress being developed in the videodefunct project may be about exploring each individual video as part of a larger collection.