Digital Video Navigation and Archival Content Management Tools for Non-linear Oral History Narratives

FAIN: HD-51513-12

New School (New York, NY 10011-8871)
Peter Asaro (Project Director: October 2011 to May 2016)

This project builds on advances in HTML 5 to allow non-linear, hypertextual connections within audio and video archives of humanities materials, with the Oral History of Robotics archive serving as a test case.

This project will enable public oral history archives of audio and video materials to present history in a way that makes it more accessible to public web users, students and educators, while allowing historians to present non-linear historical narratives. Through new open source video tools, it will support the intuitive navigation of large media archives. These tools will initially support a project on the oral history of robotics, which includes an existing archive of video interviews with pioneers in the field. Current on-line archives of materials are difficult to navigate and are forced into flat linear structures, while those with search capabilities rarely offer intuitive or accessible interfaces for non-specialists. The envisioned tools will exploit the latest capabilities of HTM15 to present materials (e.g., documents, maps, photos, and webpages and related archival videos) as a video is being viewed and navigate video in non-linear paths.