Seth Keen

Engage Media are looking for a Video Lingua Coordinator, to work on subtitling and translation of video. Using the description ‘Video Lingua’ got me thinking about a description for a videographer that works on annotating video content as a key part of the storytelling process.

Also Universal subtitles is mentioned as the program to use for subtitling which is really useful.

Lingua on wiktionary.

I wanted to keep Inger’s notes on a portable office handy for future reference – more geeky tools. From the Thesis Whisperer blog.

Prof. Peter Downton also talks about portability in ‘Writing now and then’.

I attended a workshop last week with Idunn Sem an interaction designer at InterMedia lab at The University of Oslo. Workshop description:

The workshop aims both to perform and to reflect upon the methodological shifts involved in design research. The workshop will try to put forward “artifacts of expression” and “expressive artifacts” (e.g. Díaz-Kommonen 2004) as useful abstractions of the interplay between theory and experimental prototyping in design research. To be explicit about concepts and theory as immaterial creative tools – of the inversion of analytical concepts into creative artifacts of expression, is particularly helpful in collaborative, transdisciplinary design processes where knowledge needs to be articulated, shared and adapted.

Notes and thoughts:

The workshop brought up some interesting aspects around the notion of a ‘tool’ in interaction design. I am interested in seeing if there is a tool as a type of process which applies to the way I have been researching with my phd projects. In a literal sense I thought about the way I adapt video cameras as a type of tool to capture content – because often they will not do want I want them to do, which indicates a gap in the design from a market perspective. I also thought about blogs being adapted also as a tool to make things. What I needed over the top as a type of overlay was tool as type of process that I apply to adapting these things to make stuff.

I would like to follow up form JY, Dewey’s concept of ‘expressive object’ From JY,…creating meaning out of prosiac objects.

The idea of bringing together the tacit knowledge of collaborators. Quote ?: Combine the the aim of researchers with the aims of a project.

Ideas came up around the writing of my exegesis.

a. An exegesis that responds to ideas as they emerge. The thought here is to put in potential idas that could be included in the exegesis as they come up. Enter them into the fabric that is Scrivener.A question is explored in relation to the research as it comes up.
b. Sketches, diagrams, drawings, maps, (connections, wireframe etc) that help illustrate what is being reflected on in the exegesis. It does not just have to be writing and screenshots of web projects.
c. Using video to document a prototype design is a great idea. So, video could be used to demonstrate how a prototype design came together and how it functions.

Chris Malmo demonstrated evernote being used in the field by park rangers to capture and annotate photos and audio at Wilsons Promontory.A nice way of getting metadata added to documentated content and then getting up in the cloud. Chirs overseas could check on the documentation as it happened at the Prom. Previously he had designed an iphone app for this purpose but this as described as being to prescriptive. There needed to be a looseness there for the user, in relation to their input and interests.

References from the workshop:

UBIMASH

formakademisk.org Birger Sevaldson

formakademisk.org (journal) Birger Sevaldson Discussion and Movements in Design

the lightpainting-with-Wi-Fy video
http://yourban.no/2011/02/22/immaterials-light-painting-wifi/
http://yourban.no/2011/03/07/making-immaterials-light-painting-wifi/

sevaldson article on discussions & movements in Design Research

the entire journal volume on Research by Design

Díaz-Kommonen L. (2004) “Expressive artifacts and artifacts of expression” in in the
conference series and on-line journal Research into Practice, vol 3.

Liestøl, G. (2003) “From synthesis to analysis (and vice versa): topics of conceptualisation and
construction in digital media” in Liestøl, G. Morrison A. & Rasmussen, T. (eds) Digital Media
Revisited: theoretical and conceptual innovation in digital domains. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Jonassen, D. & Rohrer-Murphy, L. (1999) Activity Theory as a Framework for Designing
Constructivist Learning Environments. ETR&D, vol 47, no 1.

Engeström, Y. Miettinen, R. PünamaÅNki, R. (eds.) (1999) Perspectives on Activity theory.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Engeström, Y. (2001) “Expansive learning at work: toward and activity theoretical
reconceptualisation”, Journal of Education and Work, vol. 14, no 1.

Lachie sent these notes for dealing with 16:9 exports for the web.

Open file in Quicktime,
Go to “Window -> Show Movie Properties”
Select “Video Track” then “Visual Settings” tab below
De-tick “Preserve Aspect Ratio”
Change scaled size to 427 x 240, stretches width to widescreen
/(OR change to 320 x 180, shrinks height to widescreen)

Also, a tool suggestion;

SQUARED 5 MPEG STREAMCLIP FOR MAC AND WINDOWS – quoted from the website:

high-quality video converter, player, editor for MPEG, QuickTime, transport streams, iPod. And now it is a DivX editor and encoding machine, and even a stream and YouTube downloader.

MPEG Streamclip 1.9.2 download web page

J & R introduced me to the SANYO Xacti E2 camcorder which is a great pocket camera for recording video and used a lot by videobloggers who want the ‘capture the moment’ option.

WordPress have gone and added a video multi-format transcoder as an upgrade to WP blogs. It comes at a cost currently – lets hope that changes down the track.

Announcing VideoPress.com

videopress post.

With the video upgrade (available on your upgrades page, bottom left of dashboard navigation) when you upload a video of almost any format we’ll crunch it into several different formats just right for streaming on the web, DVD quality, HD quality, and even optimized for iTunes and Miro.

videopress website

VideoPress is an upgrade that makes it easy to upload, embed, and share video on your WordPress.com blog or any site around the world, even in full HD.

WordPress Video Solution Framework

This package contains the video solutions framework, including transcoder and administration interface utilities, written in PHP. The code was developed by Automattic, Inc., and powers WordPress.com video solutions. It supports multiple formats, including HD. It is an open source project, which means you can reuse it, build upon it, and share it with the community.

http://pods.uproot.us/

Pods lets you create, manage, and display custom content types using WordPress. Like Drupal CCK, these content types can relate to one another, allowing for sites packed with interconnectedness. Automatic pagination, filtering, public forms, access control, menu editing and more are possible with the Pods CMS plugin.

flutter

Seesmic is a recent sharing platform that has been developed around using online video for commenting. Background on wikipedia including the person behind this venture. It has been seen as a version of twitter video and is directed towards webcams. A flash interface is being used with a MySQL database.

http://osvideo.constantvzw.org/ – open source video blog

Open Source Video is a project of Constant, a Brussels based organisation for Arts and Media. This weblog is a collective testsite for producing and distributing open source video. Here we keep traces of experiments with software for sharing and editing video, and report on what we found to be effective hardware, good linux distributions and helpful configurations. Also: tips and hints on where to find manuals, practical info on using software etc. This blog contains posts on annotating, tracing, collectively editing and sharing video online. We are interested in finding ways to make archived video material accessible, to make it searchible and keep video archives alive by allowing the content to be re-interpreted.

Caught up with Andy Nicholson from Engage Media today and learnt about their Transmission online video metadata working group.

A metadata standard for online video will ensure a common definitions for basic information such as title, date, author and language and (free) tags. This standard is to be used in video upload forms and video feeds of data coming from each participating site. The standard will allow creation of search and importation tools for (open source) Content Management Systems (CMS) like Drupal, WordPress, Plone/Plumi etc to easily locate video data in other video databases that use the standard.

Johnan Oomen replied to a post of this on the video vortex list with a reference to TX metadata standard:
EBU Core pdf—– PBCore Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary Project. He states they are both “built on the foundation of the Dublin Core (ISO 15836), an international standard for resource discovery (http://dublincore.org), widely used in the cultural heritage domain.

Meet with JJ the other day and he spoke about RDF being the next thing to watch on the web. From W3C:

Today’s web is built predominantly for human consumption. Even as machine-readable data begins to appear on the web, it is typically distributed in a separate file, with a separate format, and no correspondence between the human and machine versions. As a result, web browsers can provide only minimal assistance to humans in parsing and processing web data: browsers only see presentation information. We introduce RDFa, which provides a set of HTML attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints. We show how to express simple and more complex datasets using RDFa, and in particular how to turn the existing human-visible text and links into machine-readable data without repeating content.