Crowd- and nichesourcing for film and media scholars

[This post describes Aschwin Stacia‘s MSc. project and is based on his thesis]

There are many online and private film collections that lack structured annotations to facilitate retrieval. In his Master project work, Aschwin Stacia explored the effectiveness of a crowd-and nichesourced film tagging platform,  around a subset of the Eye Open Beelden film collection.

Specifically, the project aimed at soliciting annotations appropriate for various types of media scholars who each have their own information needs. Based on previous research and interviews, a framework categorizing these needs was developed. Based on this framework a data model was developed that matches the needs for provenance and trust of user-provided metadata.

Fimtagging screenshot
Screenshot of the FilmTagging tool, showing how users can annotate a video

A crowdsourcing and retrieval platform (FilmTagging) was developed based on this framework and data model. The frontend of the platform allows users to self-declare knowledge levels in different aspects of film and also annotate (describe) films. They can also use the provided tags and provenance information for retrieval and extract this data from the platform.

To test the effectiveness of platform Aschwin conducted an experiment in which 37 participants used the platform to make annotations (in total, 319 such annotations were made). The figure below shows the average self-reported knowledge levels.

Average self-reported knowledge levels on a 5-point scale. The topics are defined by the framework, based on previous research and interviews.
Average self-reported knowledge levels on a 5-point scale. The topics are defined by the framework, based on previous research and interviews.

The annotations and the platform were then positively evaluated by media scholars as it could provide them with annotations that directly lead to film fragments that are useful for their research activities.

Nevertheless, capturing every scholar’s specific information needs is hard since the needs vary heavily depending on the research questions these scholars have.

  • Read more details in Aschwin’s thesis [pdf].
  • Have a look at the software at https://github.com/Aschwinx/Filmtagging , and maybe start your own Filmtagging instance
  • Test the annotation platform yourself at http://astacia.eculture.labs.vu.nl/ or watch the screencast below

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