We’re excited to announce another round of funding for AudiAnnotate under a new title “AVAnnotate” with a new website: https://av-annotate.org/. The basic (free and open source) infrastructure and goals are the same: to increase the use of archival audiovisual artifacts in research and scholarship.

AVAnnotate is the second phase of the AudiAnnotate project, which was supported by a Mellon Foundation grant awarded in 2020. The AudiAnnotate project included the development of the free and open-source AudiAnnotate web application to easily produce freely available web projects. These projects—which resemble AV-centered “editions” or “exhibits”—are a series of web pages, hosted on GitHub, that feature a linked LAM audio or video recording that can be played in the context of user-generated commentary in time-stamped annotations alongside introductory material and an index of concepts and terms, all of which provide for searching, browsing, and organizing annotations across recordings. The AudiAnnotate team has also produced guidelines, workshops, and proof-of-concept projects with LAM partners to serve as much-needed examples for working with AV artifacts. [i] AVAnnotate builds on the work of AudiAnnotate by developing the application to generate projects with a more interactive and full-featured environment for editing and annotating, with better support for video, and with more reusable software components. Just as importantly, AVAnnotate will elevate awareness and promote sustainability around issues surrounding AV access in libraries and archives; scholarly, pedagogical, and public use of AV and the IIIF standard; and the social and political contexts surrounding AV access and engagement in LAM collections.

AVAnnotate Team:

Tanya Clement, Associate Professor, UT Austin Ben Brumfield, Brumfield Labs Sara Brumfield, Brumfield Labs Shawn Averkamp, AVP Nick Laiacona, Performant Software Anindita Basu Sempere, Performant Software Sam Turner, Graduate Research Assistant, UT Austin Alyssa Frick-Jenkins, Graduate Research Assistant, UT Austin Jack Riordan, Graduate Research Assistant, UT Austin

Project Partners:

Doug Boyd, Director. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History Special Collections Jason Camlot, Professor and University Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies, Concordia University, Montreal; PI, SpokenWeb Research Program Christina Davis, Curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Houghton Library, Harvard University Meghan Ferriter, Senior Innovation Specialist, Library of Congress Digital Innovation Lab (LC Labs) Steven Holloway, Director of Metadata Strategies, James Madison University Jim Kuhn, Associate Director, Harry Ransom Center, UT Austin Stephen Naron, Director of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale Libraries

Advisory Board Aaron Choate, Director of Digital Strategies, University of Texas at Austin Libraries Jason Camlot, Professor and University Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies, Concordia University, Montreal; PI, SpokenWeb Research Program Jon Dunn, Assistant Dean for Library Technologies at Indiana University, Co-Chair, IIIF A/V Technical Specification Group; Director of Avalon Media System Jennifer Guiliano, University of Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis and Director, Humanities Intensive Learning and Training – HILT Virginia Millington, Archivist, StoryCorps Support: AWE has been generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation