Research Guides: Digital Humanities: AV in DH

AV in DH

Historically, Digital Humanities has been a text-dominated field. By this we mean that most applications and projects in DH have been focused on using computational tools to encode, analyze, or otherwise utilize printed, textual materials as the object of scholarship. In recent years, we see an increasing interest in using DH tools and methodologies for studying other kinds of media including audio, video, and virtual/3D-rendered environments.

If you are interested in learning more about these facets of DH research and scholarship, a good place to start is the AV in DH Special Interest Group formed out of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Similarly, The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities provides an abundance of information related to how DH projects intersect with audio and video analytics.

AV in DH Tools & Projects

Distant Viewing TV
Distant Viewing TV uses and develops computational techniques to analyze moving image culture on a large scale using open-source computer vision libraries.
SpokenWeb
SpokenWeb is a digital spoken word archive and interface that focuses on literary readings in Montreal between 1965 and 1974. More than a digital audio archive, SpokenWeb provides users with annotations, transcription, and navigation tools that promote scholarly research activities.
Praat: Phonetics by Computer
Praat is a powerful, open-source tool developed and maintained by linguists for analyzing and annotating speech patterns, elocution, and other factors of speech in audio signals. Praat has also been used by literary scholars to conduct close-readings of archival audio materials (click "more" below).
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Historicist Audio Forensics: The Archive of Voices as Repository of Material and Conceptual Artefacts
https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.744/
Variations Audio Timeliner
VAT is an open-source, easy-to-use annotation tool for marking up any kind of digital audio file. These annotations can be ported out to HTML for easy sharing and access.

AV Heritage and History DH Projects

BFI Filmography
The BFI Filmography consists of an enormous dataset aggregated by the British Film Institute encompassing the history of British film productions. A variety of interactive data visualizations and search parameters are available to users researching the extensive production data.
Early African American Film
Similar to the BFI Filmography but focusing on African American film productions made between 1909 and 1930. This project also makes its dataset publicly available and provides helpful tutorials on using the data and a variety of visualization tools and techniques.
The Projection Project
Hosted by the University of Warwick, The Projection Project is an exploration of the role of the film projectionist as it passes into history. Utilizing a combination of virtual environments, oral histories, and archival documents and photographs, this project creates a vivid portrait of the profession's traditions and culture.
The Global Jukebox
Launched and maintained by the Association for Cultural Equity, The Global Jukebox is an expansive and ambitious project seeking to preserve and provide access to world cultures through sustaining artistic and expressive heritage.