I had a very stimulating time in Graz, participating in the DH2023 Conference. I presented with Arran the paper we wrote with Anna Maria in a stimulating session about Institutional Collaboration (see Arran’s notes and video recording of our talk). Here are some key insights from the talks and workshop I attended during the week.
AUDIO VISUAL WORKSHOP ON TUESDAY
I participated in the full day workshop AV (Audio/Visual) in DH, sponsored by the AVinDH SIG, the ADHO Special Interest Group AudioVisual Material in Digital Humanities: https://avindhsig.wordpress.com/
The aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers from various disciplines interested in audio, visual, and audio-visual approaches, methods, and data in DH. The full day included three Lightning Talks where participants shared projects and methods (where I presented the Sonic Investigations); an interactive Tutorial on video annotations, and a final informal ‘unconference’ to collaborative develop conversations.
The full programme is available here: https://avindhsig.wordpress.com/activities/workshop-2023-graz/
Video annotation was a key theme both in the lightning talks and in the tutorial where we could test one tool developed by Michaël Bourgatte and Laurent Tessier within a multidisciplinary Huma-Num Consortium gathering researchers mobilizing audiovisual corpora. The tool, Celluloid (https://celluloid.huma-num.fr/), is used in connection with PeerTube (https://joinpeertube.org/) an alternative platform to share videos. The annotations are private, the only way to see an annotated video is to join or create a project. Experimenting with this tool allowed me to realize the potential to apply video annotations to the folk songs investigation, so extending the work we are doing with Jennifer Reid on the song lyrics to the video dimension, connecting all the sonic, musical and visual elements we are annotating in the text. Michael and Laurent created an account for me on PeerTube so I am now be able experiment by uploading a video of a song and add the related annotations. Note: this tool only allows to add text or links, but another tool presented in the workshop (MemoRekall: https://memorekall.com/en/) allows to include also images. This tool was developed to annotate video recordings of dance performances and its functionalities were developed using a practice-led method (it was mentioned the Double Diamond). The process described was extremely interesting and very close to the work we want to do in the Oral History Workshop to further co-develop the visualization tool.
From the presentation ‘From MemoRekall to MemoRekall-IIIF: developing a video annotation web application in the context of citizen science co-creation practices’ by Clarisse Bardot and Jacob Hart. Photo taken by Stefania Zardini Lacedelli
During the unconference, we discussed the need to develop methods to analyse and work with sound as sound, without transforming into another (textual) form. This was related to a previous email exchange I had with Tim and Jane as they were reflecting on ‘Sonification’ methods for the Bradford exhibition. The workshop was a stimulating moment to reflect on how to go beyond language and transcription models when working with audio visual material.
The workshop organizers also shared some interesting upcoming events:
Reimagining Annotation for Multimodal Cultural Heritage Conference
AI4LAM conference
SARAH KENDERDINE’S KEYNOTE
Professor Sarah Kenderdine officially opened the Conference with the keynote “Two-Fold Revolutions: Computational Museology in the Age of Experience”. Reflecting on the concept of ‘revolution’ in museology, she talked us through the interconnected trajectories which characterized the transformation of museum practices. She started from the Ocular Revolution and stereography and the Immersion Revolution, marking the expansion of sensory perception. Both revolutionary waves consolidated the concept of virtual reality in museum practice, which was anticipated by Malraux’s ‘Museum Without Walls’ in 1947. She then focused on the Digital-Turn Revolution and on the rethinking of the concept of object with the exhibition Deep Fakes (https://epfl-pavilions.ch/exhibitions/deep-fakes-art-and-its-double), and on the Community Revolution and the participatory wave, with the example of the community-led exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters exhibition (https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/songlines). Finally, she described the new wave of Computational Museology, with the emergence of AI, as a revolution that has the ability to link all forms of culture (tangible, intangible, digital) and materiality, uniting ‘machine intelligence with data curation, ontology with visualization, and communities of publics and practitioners with embodied interaction through immersive interfaces’. She mentioned the rise of new Archival Ontologies and Narratives, showing the Hong Kong tech initiative Future Cinema System and Narratives from the Long Tail aimed to transform access to Audio-Visual Archives (https://www.futurecinema.live/).