Overview: The goal of the AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow (AWE) project is to accelerate access to, promote scholarship and teaching with, and extend understanding of significant digital AV collections in the humanities.
In response to the need for a workflow that supports IIIF manifest creation, collaborative editing, flexible modes of presentation, and permissions control, the AudiAnnotate project is developing AWE, a documented workflow using the recently adopted IIIF standard for AV materials that will help libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs), scholars, and the public access and use AV cultural heritage items. We will achieve this goal by connecting existing best-of-breed, open source tools for AV management (Aviary), annotation (such as Audacity and OHMS), public code and document repositories (GitHub), and the AudiAnnotate web application for creating and sharing IIIF manifests and annotations. Usually limited by proprietary software and LAM systems with restricted access to AV, users will use AWE as a complete sequence of tools and transformations for accessing, identifying, annotating, and sharing AWE “projects” such as singular pages or multi-page exhibits or editions with AV materials. LAMs will benefit from AWE as it facilitates metadata generation, is built on W3C web standards in IIIF for sharing online scholarship, and generates static web pages that are lightweight and easy to preserve and harvest. AWE represents a new kind of AV ecosystem where the exchange is opened between institutional repositories, annotation software, online repositories and publication platforms, and all kinds of users.
AWE partnerships with institutions such as the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Library of Congress Labs, the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale Library, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky, the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University, and the SpokenWeb Consortium will provide use cases to test the workflow and demonstrate its benefits to users and LAMs, thus encouraging broad use. Use cases developed through these partnerships will demonstrate the different ways that LAMs use (or don’t use) DAMs; the wide variety of humanities materials in AV formats from poetry performances to oral histories that cultural heritage institutions hold; and the range of restrictions that users encounter, from freely available AV streamed online to materials accessible to a consortium of institutions, to artifacts that are locked down in private collections. These use cases collectively demonstrate (1) researchers annotating materials held at multiple holding institutions and presenting these annotations as a single, free-to-access project, (2) researchers with privileges annotating restricted materials but sharing annotations publicly, (3) multiple researchers working together at different holding institutions to produce annotations authored by many, and (4) a holding institution harvesting these annotations to increase the information they can provide about their AV cultural heritage artifacts. Better understanding and documenting these use cases is key to broadening the use of both IIIF and AV materials. These and other use cases will be described and shared in detail at each AWE project partner workshop, in presentations at the annual IIIF consortium and the annual DH or ACH conference, and in online documentation for scholars and the general public.
