How to use digital video with Omeka

Posted on October 2 2012 by William Cowan

I believe that playing back digital video on the web presents a special set issues for scholars, content managers and technologists that are not often addressed in commercial products and on websites, such as YouTube, that focus primarily on entertainment not education, research or public exhibits. Using digital video in these areas requires the ability to segment videos, provide voice or text based annotation and the presentation of the segments in the context of the original video as well as the ability to present video segments and annotation with other related videos. In addition, since much of this work is done in the context of a library, museum or other public facility or project, and often requires some search and discovery of the video segments, the ability to collect and present metadata about each segment is important as well.  In relation to work that I have done on a plugin and themes that allow the loading and playback of videos and video segments into Omeka, I would like to discuss the current state of video segment playback and some of the choices that have to be made when playing back video on the web.

About William Cowan

Twitter: @wgcowan
Website: www.dlib.indiana.edu
 I have about 20 years of enterprise system development both in the private sector and at Indiana University. I have extensive experience working with relational databases, working as a database administrator and/or managing database administrators at Millipore Corporation in Massachusetts and Alexsis Corporation and Proquest Corporation in Michigan. In addition at Proquest, I managed the business systems staff of about 30 members including developers, system designers, system architects, DBA’s and System Administrators. At Indiana University, I have been the project manager and system architect for several successful projects including Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis, a multi-year Mellon funded project, and the Ethnomusicalogy Multimedia project with Indiana University Press and Temple University Press, as well as leading development in the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities in the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. I am currently the Associate Director of Software Development Digital Libraries managing multiple projects and a development team of 6 to 8 systems analyst. I am also the principal investigator for an NEH Office of Digital Humanities start-up grant to create a video annotation plugin for Omeka that will allow the display of video segments plus annotation in Omeka and Omeka exhibits. All posts by William Cowan →

2 Responses to How to use digital video with Omeka

  1. John Yackulics says:

    This sounds like a fascinating topic for discussion. I’m building an oral history project for my local Boy Scout Troop and this would certainly be very helpful in giving me ideas for incorporating digital video into an online web portal.

  2. lauren.kata says:

    We’re looking at Omeka and I’d love to walk away with some lessons learned, and specifically with regard to decision making for web published content.