Video Archives Research Articles

Digitalisation of the flm industry in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic

The structure of the flm industry has changed signifcantly over the past two years. The decline in cinema attendance, the activation of flm distribution on digital platforms, the decline in the level of flm production and other reasons have led to a transformation in the production and consumption of audiovisual content. The change of the main content customer has become an important trend in 2021. Online platforms have replaced production and television companies. Neither the personnel nor the infrastructure of the flm industry was ready for such a volume of orders for production from online cinemas. This caused a sharp rise in prices and an increase in the cost of flm production. The industry is actually in crisis. Based on the study, the authors concluded that today state pays quite a lot of attention to the issues of the digitalization of the flm industry. The study notes the strengthening of state control over digital video platforms, a change in the scheme of state fnancing of the industry, the allocation of large fnancial resources for the digitalization of video archives, the introduction of electronic document management in the feld of flm production, flm distribution, in the process of submitting flm copies to the archive, etc. The authors of the article offer a partial solution to one of the main current problems of the industry – the crisis of traditional cinema distribution with the strengthening of digital distribution. According to the study, the participation of the state can also help with it. For example, by strengthening state funding of audiovisual products intended for cinema rental, as well as strengthening support for cinemas in times of crisis.

#1plus1plus1is3

#1plus1plus1is3

Apocalypse of Art (Cinema. People. Close-up.)

The purpose of the study is to analyze the impact of artistic space commercialization on the development of the artistic process and to find out the growth factors of the latest digital masculinity on the audience. The research methodology consists in the application of the following methods: historical – analysis of sources on the problems of conflict between works of art and a commercial product; theoretical – a study of the factors of growth of the influence of the latest digital masculinity on the audience; practical – work with archival videos related to iconic figures in the development of cinema in Ukraine and the world. Scientific novelty. The influence main stages of digital and information technologies on the development of modern cinema and serial production are investigated. It was found that the all-encompassing aggressive commercialization of the art space and the latest digital masculinity are increasingly negatively affecting the development of the art process. Conclusions. In the course of the article, we have proved that technical and technological development, human greed and ignorance kill real cinema. Art has become a commercial product for its own human enrichment – without immersion in the depths of the human psyche.

Studying rare events in policing: the allure and limitations of using body-worn camera video

ABSTRACT Many intriguing and socially significant policing research questions center on relatively rare events. Scholars may find few viable options to studying those rare events, limiting the development of research to support scientific knowledge and policy responses. The proliferation of body-worn cameras (BWCs) has produced a unique research opportunity through the creation of video archives documenting how officers interact with citizens and police communities. Researchers have access to aspects of police work and behavior previously available only through resource- and time-intensive methodologies, such as field observation. The allure of using video footage is understandably strong, but the limitations of this research methodology need to be understood and ameliorated. This article examines the use of video to support research, focusing on the methodological implications of this emerging research approach. We offer a case study examining police use of force in an east coast department to illustrate the potential and limitations of analyzing video content.

Digital outreach in online dementia discourse

Introduction: The rapid online expansion of social media can decrease social isolation for both caregivers and persons with dementia (PWD) through the digital communities they create. Background: PWD and their caregivers are increasingly turning to social media to express their own concerns and offer advice to each other. Material analyzed: Multimodal methods were used to analyze three online sites – two caregiver sites and one site for PWD. The sites are StoryCall, a video archive recorded by South Carolina caregivers about caring for US veterans with dementia; Molly and Joey, a video series of Joey’s interactions with his mother Molly, who had Lewy body dementia; and Dementia Diaries, oral diaries transcribed by volunteers. Results: The topics discussed online by people who wish to advise caregivers often differ from the issues and topics that most concern or interest caregivers. Persons with dementia openly shared that they still wished to live as well as possible and wanted to be seen as real people. Implications and conclusions: Through social media, PWD remind themselves and others that they are more than their condition; similarly, caregivers of PWD educate themselves and others through sharing experiences and asking questions.

The Dance Company Film

The Dance Company Film

Understanding dance semantics using spatio-temporal features coupled GRU networks

The efforts are taken for cultural heritage preservation lead to many digitization initiatives. Indian Classical Dance and its tradition has proven historical importance. Computer-aided archiving and preservation of Indian classical dance resources open enormous opportunities for computational analysis. With the help of recent computational advancements in the field of Computer Vision, these archives can be transformed into intelligent information retrieval systems. In this work, we propose a novel method for understanding the dance semantics by making use of the Spatio-temporal variations of dance features. A video archive is created as a part of this work, from live recordings of different trained dancers and clippings from the internet. The Deep Pose Estimator coupled GRU Model deals with the spatial aspects with a deep learning pose estimator and handles the temporal perspective with GRU Network. The efficiency of the proposed method was compared with benchmark methods such as A 3D-Convolutional Neural Network-based Model, Time Distributed CNN-LSTM Model, and Hybrid Transfer Learning - LSTM Model and the results show the proposed method outperformed others even with different video resolutions.

Design of a DFS to Manage Big Data in Distance Education Environments

Information technologies have invaded every aspect of our lives. Distance education was also affected by this phase and became an accepted model of education. The evolution of education into a digital platform has also brought unexpected problems, such as the increase in internet usage, the need for new software and devices that can connect to the Internet. Perhaps the most important of these problems is the management of the large amounts of data generated when all training activities are conducted remotely. Over the past decade, studies have provided important information about the quality of training and the benefits of distance learning. However, Big Data in distance education has been studied only to a limited extent, and to date no clear single solution has been found. In this study, a Distributed File Systems (DFS) is proposed and implemented to manage big data in distance education. The implemented ecosystem mainly contains the elements Dynamic Link Library (DLL), Windows Service Routines and distributed data nodes. DLL codes are required to connect Learning Management System (LMS) with the developed system. 67.72% of the files in the distance education system have small file size (<=16 MB) and 53.10% of the files are smaller than 1 MB. Therefore, a dedicated Big Data management platform was needed to manage and archive small file sizes. The proposed system was designed with a dynamic block structure to address this shortcoming. A serverless architecture has been chosen and implemented to make the platform more robust. Moreover, the developed platform also has compression and encryption features. According to system statistics, each written file was read 8.47 times, and for video archive files, this value was 20.95. In this way, a framework was developed in the Write Once Read Many architecture. A comprehensive performance analysis study was conducted using the operating system, NoSQL, RDBMS and Hadoop. Thus, for file sizes 1 MB and 50 MB, the developed system achieves a response time of 0.95 ms and 22.35 ms, respectively, while Hadoop, a popular DFS, has 4.01 ms and 47.88 ms, respectively.

Excellent!: Textiles from Mali

Excellent!: Textiles from Mali

Feeling ‘Pretty Porky & Pissed Off’: a photo essay on fatness, affect, art, and archives

ABSTRACT This photo essay is about the process of creating a digital archive dedicated to Pretty Porky and Pissed Off, a Toronto-based fat activist and performance art collective active in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As a leading member of the collective and the project’s principal investigator (Allyson Mitchell) and the project’s researcher archivist (Allison Taylor) we explore the affective potential of the visual archival fat representations produced through Pretty Porky and Pissed Off’s artistic practice. We first provide an overview of the Pretty Porky and Pissed Off archive project. Second, we contextualize our photo essay within queer and fat studies scholarship on affect, archives, and the visual. Third, we present a set of stills from archival video footage of a Pretty Porky and Pissed Off clothing swap in Allyson Mitchell’s art studio. Using these stills, we consider the affectively rich nature of visual archival representations of fatness. We suggest that feelings are a central component of visual archival fat representations; feelings offer important insights about the potential of visual artistic and archival practices to represent, embody, and imagine fatness otherwise.

Artificial intelligence-aided railroad trespassing detection and data analytics: Methodology and a case study

The railroad industry plays a principal role in the transportation infrastructure and economic prosperity of the United States, and safety is of the utmost importance. Trespassing is the leading cause of rail-related fatalities and there has been little progress in reducing the trespassing frequency and deaths for the past ten years in the United States. Although the widespread deployment of surveillance cameras and vast amounts of video data in the railroad industry make witnessing these events achievable, it requires enormous labor-hours to monitor real-time videos or archival video data. To address this challenge and leverage this big data, this study develops a robust Artificial Intelligence (AI)-aided framework for the automatic detection of trespassing events. This deep learning-based tool automatically detects trespassing events, differentiates types of violators, generates video clips, and documents basic information of the trespassing events into one dataset. This study aims to provide the railroad industry with state-of-the-art AI tools to harness the untapped potential of video surveillance infrastructure through the risk analysis of their data feeds in specific locations. In the case study, the AI has analyzed over 1,600 h of archival video footage and detected around 3,000 trespassing events from one grade crossing in New Jersey. The data generated from these big video data will potentially help understand human factors in railroad safety research and contribute to specific trespassing proactive safety risk management initiatives and improve the safety of the train crew, rail passengers, and road users through engineering, education, and enforcement solutions to trespassing.

Bone in the Throat: Video archiving and identity building within the Montreal hardcore scene

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the Montreal hardcore scene was a vibrant, thriving and dynamic subculture with a strong sense of community. The generational and cyclical nature of such scenes has led, over the past two decades, to a significant crowd turnover with older people leaving and newcomers taking over. However, through the emergence of an Instagram account created by a man named Andy Chico Mak, its past memories are resurfacing. The recent dissemination of the Bone in the Throat series on social media, along with other archives including flyers, interviews and never-seen-before footage from the era, sparks a series of questions regarding the role and impact of archiving subcultures. Since the archival turn in social sciences, archives are considered as a reflexive and constitutive process of identity building and collective memory creating. In the case of subcultures, often overlooked by official heritage institutions, the importance of understanding archives as a site of cultural production is paramount. The collection and preservation of self-produced documents is key to scholars in order to understand the social and political dynamics at the heart of those communities. This article analyses the impact of years of video archives, gathered and organized through the work of Andy Chico Mak, in the process allowing the creation of collective memory and the development of ‘scene identity’. By relating to contemporary conversations about archiving subcultures, it also provides insight into the impact of new technologies and the creation of ‘subcultural collective memory’.

СОВЕТСКО-АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ САММИТ В РЕЙКЬЯВИКЕ 1986 г.

The article is devoted to one of the most important summits at the highest level at the end of the Cold War. During the implementation of the renewed Soviet international policy of New Thinking, the American side was apprehensive about taking reciprocal steps aimed at breaking the bipolar structure of the world. Many obstacles had to be overcome by both the USSR and the USA: mutual distrust that had been developing for several decades, insufficient coordination within the administrations of diplomatic missions, loud statements by independent American media, contradictory situations in the intelligence services, etc. The author of the article pays attention to the espionage scandal that took place on the eve of the upcoming meeting, which significantly slowed down the negotiation process. She has studied in detail the documentary materials of the US State Archive of National Security, which provided an opportunity to cover the events of 1986 in a more multifaceted and accurate way. The article contains references to the publication of US intelligence reports to the president, as well as a personal letter from Mikhail Gorbachev to R. Reagan, which is known to the Russian scientific world only as recorded from Gorbachev's words. An analysis of the 1986 Reykjavik meeting is based on English-language documents as well as archival video materials from the Reagan Presidential Library. Memoirs of eyewitnesses of the summit made it possible to trace the historical and psychological aspects of the negotiations. The author used the personal diary of President R. Reagan and the complete edition of the memoirs of Secretary of State J. Schultz, which have not yet been translated into Russian, that made it possible to give a more accurate picture of the motives and fears of the White House on the eve of the Soviet-American meeting in 1986.

ИНСТИТУТ ЖЕНСКОГО ШАМАНСТВА У ЭВЕНКОВ ДАЛЬНЕГО ВОСТОКА (ПО МАТЕРИАЛАМ ПОЛЕВЫХ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ)

In the course of field research on the territory of three Evenki settlements (Iengra Neryungrinsky ulus of the Yakutia, Pervomayskoye and Bomnak of the Amur region), we collected information about the features of mythology, genealogy, formation, equipment and practice of female shamans. The purpose of the study was to describe female shamanism among the Evenks, its current state, work with shamans, their clients, interviewing the local population, meetings and conversations with representatives of local administrations, work in scientific archives and local history museums, video recording of interviews, rituals, holidays, ceremonies, daily life of the Evenks. During the expedition, 35 people related to shamanism were interviewed. A video recording of shamanic ritual was made. More than 1000 photos, 20 hours of audio, 22 hours of video were recorded. Archival videos on the traditional culture of the Evenks of the Far East, including female shamanism, have been collected. The materials of the expedition work confirmed the existence of female shamanism as a separate institution in the culture of the Far Eastern Evenks. In the studied areas, both male and female shamans really practice, and ethnophores were able to describe the differences between male and female shamanism. While observing the general principles of the cult, the female version of shamanism has specific features. This is found in the form of shamanic gift transmission, the course of shamanic disease, the age when shamanic practice begins, the field of activity and the style of the ritual. Female shamans use special methods of treatment and divination, have a costume and attributes that differ from men's. Often male shamans and female shamans are in a confrontation at the sacred level. The status of female shamans is quite high and is not inferior to the status of male shamans.

Artificial intelligence for a role change in television archives: The Atresmedia–Etiqmedia experience

Given the increasing volume of audiovisual content being produced, combined with the growing demand for granularity in image searches, it is becoming increasingly impractical for television archives to catalogue their collections without automatic processing and artificial intelligence technologies. This paper describes a pioneering project to implement such technologies.

Illuminations

One of the most important questions for videographic research today is the relationship between textuality and audiovisuality. Does textuality always have to frame and contextualize video, in order for it to be research? What if textuality were located topologically within video, instead of the other way around? Is text needed at all? Can’t some audiovisual material “speak” for itself? In 2020, as the Coronavirus pandemic was setting in, I decided to launch an open call for a special issue of illuminated videos. As I wrote in the call, many practitioners did not have the opportunity to work with others this year, because of the pandemic. I thought it might be a good time to ask people to go back into their video archives and think about how they might annotate and recontextualize selected audiovisual material. Contributors were asked to work with a piece of uncut video. No editing of the video or audio tracks was allowed, except for basic corrections. In other words, the audiovisual track has to follow its own temporality, without cuts. The contributions to this special issue are presented in order from shortest to longest. I hope this will be useful way to introduce the form of illuminated video.

Des Moines Gay Men’s Chorus, Queer Spaces, Collectives Styles, and Activist Dress, 1984 to the Present

During the 1970s, people in the United States founded gay and lesbian choruses for political activism, coming out, and celebration. We examined the history of one of these choruses, the Des Moines Gay Men’s Chorus (DMGMC). We asked, how do their bodies in motion and styling-fashioning-dressing produce, distribute, and negotiate queer representations? How do they appear across space and time? How can these style-fashion-dress acts open multiple interpretations and dialectical subtleties? To answer these questions, we analyzed the original DMGMC slogan T-shirt, the digital archive of historical LGBT T-shirts, performance videos and imagery, song lyrics, news articles, and oral histories. The chorus members negotiated queer sensibilities, choral traditions, activism, and community building through their T-shirts and performance costumes in complex ways. They negotiated queer representations by creating temporary queer spaces during the AIDS crisis and highlighting how community and visibility have been significant in gay history. However, the chorus often prioritized an appropriate kind of gay man via dress, which they reinforced through racial-power dynamics, complex-gender associations related to tuxedos, and cabaret performance outfits that included nun’s habits. The chorus’ various collective styles esthetically represent how gay men’s choruses navigate entanglements of tradition, gayness, and music while reclaiming oppressive symbology.

Donaldson, Peter S., dir. and editor-in-chief, and Alexa Alice Joubin, co-dir. MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive.

Donaldson, Peter S., dir. and editor-in-chief, and Alexa Alice Joubin, co-dir. MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive.

Digital Semiology: A Prototype for Standardized, Computer-Based Semiologic Encoding of Seizures.

Video-EEG monitoring (VEM) is imperative in seizure classification and presurgical assessment of epilepsy patients. Analysis of VEM is currently performed in most institutions using a freeform report, a time-consuming process resulting in a non-standardized report, limiting the use of this essential diagnostic tool. Herein we present a pilot feasibility study of our experience with “Digital Semiology” (DS), a novel seizure encoding software. It allows semiautomated annotation of the videos of suspected events from a predetermined, hierarchal set of options, with highly detailed semiologic descriptions, somatic localization, and timing. In addition, the software's semiologic extrapolation functions identify characteristics of focal seizures and PNES, sequences compatible with a Jacksonian march, and risk factors for SUDEP. Sixty episodes from a mixed adult and pediatric cohort from one level 4 epilepsy center VEM archives were analyzed using DS and the reports were compared with the standard freeform ones, written by the same epileptologists. The behavioral characteristics appearing in the DS and freeform reports overlapped by 78–80%. Encoding of one episode using DS required an average of 18 min 13 s (standard deviation: 14 min and 16 s). The focality function identified 19 out of 43 focal episodes, with a sensitivity of 45.45% (CI 30.39–61.15%) and specificity of 87.50% (CI 61.65–98.45%). The PNES function identified 6 of 12 PNES episodes, with a sensitivity of 50% (95% CI 21.09–78.91%) and specificity of 97.2 (95% CI 88.93–99.95%). Eleven events of GTCS triggered the SUDEP risk alert. Overall, these results show that video recordings of suspected seizures can be encoded using the DS software in a precise manner, offering the added benefit of semiologic alerts. The present study represents an important step toward the formation of an annotated video archive, to be used for machine learning purposes. This will further the goal of automated VEM analysis, ultimately contributing to wider utilization of VEM and therefore to the reduction of the treatment gap in epilepsy.

Software for generation of video files metadata

In today’s world, information is one of the most important resources. Its large turnover in the media makes companies look for ways to automate processes related to labeling and storage of data. But often these processes are left on the shoulders of archive workers who have to review the footage in real-time and create metadata based on what they see, which will be transferred into the archive. This process is often very time-consuming. As a result of the analysis of approaches to video data processing, comparative analysis of the efficiency and availability of computer vision services, a software for searching faces, and forming metadata in the video archive of the VGTRK company was designed and implemented.