oExtending the Annotator’s Workbench

o From EVIADA to CAMVA

o William G. Cowan

o Michael Durbin

History of EVIADA and CAMVAo Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital

Archive (started 2001)• Extensive use of video from field collecting • Desire to preserve this video• Ability to annotate this video• Networked access for research and instruction

o Central America and Mexico Video Archive (started 2005)

• Goal: Digitize, preserve, and make available hundreds of hours of at-risk or deteriorating film and video footage from three Central American archives• Methodology: Leverage tools and experience from EVIA Digital

Archive project as much as possible

IU Partners for CAMVA

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Digital Library ProgramCenter for the Study of History and MemoryEVIADA

Central American Partners

El Salvador– MUPI: Museo de la Imagen y la Palabra

Nicaragua– IHNCA: Instituto de la Historia de Nicaragua y

CentroamericaMexico

– CIESAS: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiore en Antropologia Socíal

CAMVA Support

Grant from the Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) program of the US Department of Education

October 1, 2005 – September 30, 2009Project Director: Jeff Gould, CLACSProject Manager: Mike Grove, CLACSUITS Personnel: Jon Dunn, Will CowanEVIADA Support: Mike Durbin, Shah AkramCAMVA Developer: Gulshan Patil

CAMVA Process

Video digitized by Central American institutions or local vendors

Transmitted to IU via Internet or DVDsTranscoded to delivery formats at IU; made available

via IU’s streaming servers and stored in MDSS / preservation repository

CAMVA Software Development

Starting points:– EVIA Annotator’s Workbench– EVIA Web Search & Browse Interface– EVIA Controlled Vocabulary Tool

Operate within the larger technical environment at Indiana University

Customize to be more appropriate to needs of CAMVA

Some differences between EVIA and CAMVA

Need for multilingual interfaces for annotation and access

Need for multilingual metadata, controlled vocabularies

More varied genres of videoVideo being described by archivists or catalogers, not

the original creatorLess focus on preservation; more on access

What we didn’t want

o Too tightly coupled• Need to meet the needs of CAMVA• No flexibility

o Parallel Software Development• i.e. CAMVA takes existing EVIADA code and does

its own development• Synchronization nightmare

What we decided to do

o Extend the Annotator’s Workbench•Multilingual - start with Spanish but could be any

language• Flexible window layout - different windows and

different layouts for different workflows• Flexible data entry - different fields for different uses• New XML Schema supports extended Annotator’s

Workbench

Annotator’s Workbench B.C. (Before CAMVA)

o DEMO

Design and Implementation:

o Internationalizationo Modularize the Annotator’s Workbench• Determine scope of customizability•Fields•Components•Features

• Create a means of expressing the configuration• Layout XML Schema

Design Considerations: Fields

o User interface must gracefully accept arbitrary inclusion of fields• Largely manual process considering all possible

combinations and looking at the user interfaceo Entered metadata and annotation must be preserved,

even when not exposed to the user in the current layout

Design Considerations: Components

o A generalization of our component configuration must minimally support the current EVIA layout and the proposed CAMVA layout• Components can be internal windows or anchored• Components can have relative sizes or absolute

sizes• Components must fit into an arbitrarily sized

container (the main application window)

Design Considerations: Components

o Unable to find standard solutions to analogous formatting problems• Predefined layouts for Java were unsuitable• HTML doesn’t deal with the same issues• Doesn’t seem to be any standard model for this kind

of layout configuration

Design Considerations: Components

o Final Design• Anchored components are

laid out sequentially in blocks that are anchored to one side of the remaining formatting area

• Floating components are placed in their percentage-based position

• Minimum sizes for floating component override layout specification

Demo of Annotator’s Workbench

o

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are needed to see this picture.