We held our third community consultation and co-design workshop at the British Library Labs on Monday the 26th of October October. Thanks Mahendra Mahey, manager of British Library Labs, for organising the hosting of the event. We really do hope to return in Phase 3!and thanks to all the people who attended and gave so generously of their time and insights.
This was another busy and productive workshop with lots of ideas and suggestions and collaborative opportunities to follow up. For us, a particularly useful encounter was with Tom Crane from Digirati and this has continued really useful dialogue about technical standards that we are working into our phase 3 plans. It is really encouraging to see people so keen about adopting the toolkit. Below I have recorded the main points in bullet format.
11:00 Demonstration – prototype system, initial feedback and discussion
- Good for language teaching – immediate use (Elina +)
- UCL central teaching tech support – many uses including lecture videos
- BUFVC – yes we could use it to extend our service
- Audio annotation – i.e. to be able to attach / pin an audio recording file as an annotation to a resource in a Cliplist (the resource could be an audio or video). Useful for many purposes as well as accessibility such as language teaching (e.g. translation)
- cf with the visual annotations for audio suggested in Manchester
- Using with audio / video submissions for assessments
- Teacher clips / annotates a student submission
- Students clip / annotate their resources for submission
- What about enabling student annotations to be put through Turnitin? – would need to use the Turnitin API and save the annotation as a PDF? Or somehow upload the annotation text for a Turnitin report
- Visual drawn annotations on top of the video (linked to the timeline to complement the text annotation (use the Canvas element overlay the video)
- Manual entry of times in the clip creator
- Are the URLs persistent? (Mahendra / Daniela / Ollie). Yes as long as you follow good practice or control the resources – even if the link breaks the UGC will still be useful
- UCL can I test with my own files? Yes using the paste URL (Will uses Roslin example)
- Mahendra HTML5 works on mobile?
- BUFVC and UCL – aware of videojs and the author Brian Cove
- Ollie – can we add web links to the text? Yes
- Mahendra – any limit to annotation text? No. Can we use Unicode? Yes
- UCL have a sound cloud collection – could they use it with that? Need to investigate APIs etc. – this is a theme emerging the need to integrate with social media services etc.
- Annotations – how are they presented – can they pop up? (suggests that customizable edit and consumer views might be useful)
- Can we have annotations on the video? And just on still images?
- What format are the annotations in? HTML. Suggests a need for rich text editor possibly plus the annotations etc. can be outputted in different formats CSV, Excel, XML
- UCL Can the thumbnails be changed? Yes if the resources are on your server (what about UCL as development partners?)
- BUFVC – Citations? By which we mean is it capable of taking the catalogue information/ metadata from a resource collection and using it to pre-populate fields? Yes as long as Clipper is integrated into the system. A good way to visualize this is to look at the existing Clipper integration with YouTube – where Clipper is using the open APIs to harvest and use the data to populate the title and description fields and the thumbnails
- UCL / Pete Collins Jisc – could Clipper be integrated into Facebook? Yes
- What about licences? Of the resource content? Really about user awareness but we also need to be able to represent licence conditions clearly in Clipper. Also needs to be born in mind that clipper only gives users access to the resources that have rights to view. If a Cliplist is shared with people who do not have the rights to view / listen then they see the annotations and descriptions and titles of the Clips but not the a/v content.
- Ollie – the sharing experiences of services like soundcloud would be useful. The ability to share with selected users, groups, social media and to use tags and categories to manage your own content and help other people find it
- CF Facebook closed groups and open group and notifications. So some stuff could be open (metadata and UGC) to encourage people to find and identify stuff of interest to them so that they would then go further and log in
- Tree Browser and Daily Motion – Trevors Note
11:45 Practical hands-on – try it and feedback
- UCL – mobile first, responsive design policy especially for students. Discussion about how most students will consume content on mobile devices (?) so Clipper out needs to be responsive. Discussion about edit view will probably need to be on laptop
- There are problems with mobile video on Apple devices – explore and answer
- UCL – would be good for creating a synopsis of the content via annotations and clips and also for deployment in Moodle as a plugin (?)
- Does it / can it work offline?
- Tom Crane – difference between Creation view / interface and consumer view interface
- Will there be short codes for WordPress? https://codex.wordpress.org/Shortcode
- Ollie UAL – Ability to handle groups would be good (permissions) ability to follow groups and get updates and see latest activity on a dashboard (admin teacher views of the dashboard and user activity)
- Following on from above – Olli and Trevor and others discussion – best to use existing tools for collaboration and groups work etc. such as WordPress, VLE and Moodle – so best to look at integration with them? So more user management and permissions is the key to that kind of thing
- Linda from BUFVC – more metadata is needed – to be pulled in from existing catalogue data to pre-populate fields in Cliplists etc. so that it could be part of the workflow
- Possible answers for collaboration tools are Bootcamp for comments also look at the P2 theme from WordPress
- Our use of WordPress is good for rapid prototyping – from the Southampton colleague who did Synote
- Note for Phase 3 bid examples of early adopters with screen shots if possible
13:30 Discussion – implications for data management, service development and policy
Data management
- Useful for teaching and using an institutional archive
- Issues about anonymity, ethics, sharing
- RDF storage of comments?
- What happens at the end of time limited content
- Tom Crane need licences for annotations and access conditions by default as options
- Share via zip and email
- How might the licence conditions of annotation relate to the audio / video – need to make clear the distinction to the users (both editors and consumers)
- How can you search through the different resources? Needs to be connected into the collection concerned – the current connection to YouTube is a good example
- HTML5 is fine for the tool and storing the data but what happens when the standards change?
- Good question – well HTML is probably the most documented electronic communications standard in history so prospects for access and reuse into new formats are very good
- In Clipper there is a 3 way split of storing data that provides good forwards compatibility and preservation
- Database
- JSON
- HTML (presentation
Service Development
- UCL – audio-visual resources are in general difficult to manage
- Clipper could be used as an institutional service and as an individual personal service
- The copy and paste URL would be a very useful function – potentially cover a lot of independent researcher scenarios
- Use Clipper as an ‘API’ tool. By hooking it up with existing services such as:
- Opencast / Matterhorn
- Vimeo
- Soundscape
- Kaltura
- BUFVC
- Jisc Media Hub
- Tom Crane Digirati. The IIIF standards community is very interested in this toolkit and could be of great help.
- Running a service means dealing with standards and exceptions (BUFVC)
- Integration with Turnitin for annotations used in assessment
- What about using Clipper to create citations from audio-visual datasets?
Policy
- Ideally Clipper would be bundled with a policy development pack highlighting some of the issues and questions that need to be addressed when considering an institutional deployment. Especially relevant for learning and teaching where policy is underdeveloped. Would be good to have some example policies and a policy editor to create / paste the text. Have a policy agreement tick box facility
- Be good to have the ability for policy to cover projects and groups of users on projects
- Data protection issues
- Levels of sharing inside an institution should be possible (onion skin metaphor)
- Openness should be encouraged policy wise and possible technically
- External search of Clipper content? How would that be managed?
- Have a licence picker (all the Creative Commons options by default plus straight copyright)
- Would be good to save direct to an institutional repository to have plug ins to do so – and to shared services like Figshare
- For sustainability it might be a good idea to apply to the Apache incubator? Needs 3 independent people
- The open annotation standard and the IIIF standard might be the answer?
Tom Crane (Digirati) Notes
- Provenance of annotations (who, when)
- Search API – see the IIIF search spec
- JSON => JSON-LD this would allow project JSON to stand alone
- Look at alignment to common vocabularies (to increase take up)
- Dealing with 3rd party resources – how would the authentication flow work
- Common Annotation format
- Annotation server
- Tagging
- Searching
- Encourage video providers to enable CORS > to allow snapshots of the canvas
- Indirection – allow an annotations to be pinned to non existent segments of video cf for film restoration
- Indirection – allows annotation targets of an abstract ‘canvas’ allows different formats
- Ability to annotate regions of the image (x,y,w,h)
- Clipper app is both an authoring and viewing environment. What ir produces needs to be able to be consumed in simpler read-only viewers.
14:30 Technical discussion, ideas and requirements for institutional deployment / national service
Writing up in progress from audio