Implementation Phase
July 2006 - June 2009
he EVIA
Digital Archive project is a joint effort of Indiana University and the University of Michigan to establish a digital archive of ethnomusicological video for use by scholars and instructors. Planning began in 2001 and has brought together experts in the fields of ethnomusicology, archiving, video, intellectual property, and digital technology. Ultimately, the EVIA Digital Archive preserves video recordings with the intention of making them easily accessible for teaching and research, providing an alternative to physical archives whose unique materials are available only to people who travel to the archive location. Our goal is to create a functioning digital repository and delivery system of digital video and accompanying metadata. Part of this metadata will include peer-reviewed annotations and analyses of video content by the scholars who made the recordings. Using the bandwidth capabilities of Internet2, we will provide high quality video streams to scholars for new research endeavors and to teachers for creating rich learning experiences.
he field
of ethnomusicology has depended throughout its history on the latest recording technology to help document and subsequently analyze the musical practices of people all over the world. Closely allied with the disciplines of anthropology, musicology, and folklore, ethnomusicologists analyze music both as sound and as one of many interrelated cultural systems. Research for ethnomusicologists may involve library or archival work, but what distinguishes them from many other scholars in the humanities is that most ethnomusicologists conduct ethnographic research or "fieldwork" as well. Because music events around the world rarely involve music-sound alone, ethnomusicologists attend to the multiple channels of creative communication that surround these events and thus regard video as an extremely useful research tool. Musical performances recorded on video in the last three decades will be the centerpiece of this project. Unfortunately, data on videotape deteriorates quickly. Hence, a high level of urgency surrounds the immediate preservation of these recordings.
The project presently has approximately 300 hours of video archived and has begun to expand into the related fields of anthropology, folklore, and ethnochoreology. Plans are on schedule to add an additional 150 hours in 2008 and again in 2009. None of this material is available online yet because we are making revisions to our online Search and Browse application and completing peer reviews. However, we expect to have material available online in the next 6 months. In order to facilitate the annotation of each depositor’s collection of roughly 10 hours of video, we have held 2 week-long summer institutes during which the scholars work intensively, annotating their collection in collaboration with catalogers, technologists and the other assembled scholars
Software development has been a significant part of the project. Tools we have created thus far include: a) Controlled Vocabulary and Thesaurus Maintenance Tool; b) The Annotator’s Workbench (for creating scholarly annotations of video); c) Technical Metadata Entry Tool; d) Peer Review Tool; e) Promotion and Tenure Review Tool; and f) Online Search and Browse Tool. The tools will eventually be available as Open Source software and have been developed with a broad range of content in mind.
See the Development Phase Proposal for more details about the project [1
MB pdf].
For an application to the 2009 Summer Institute, click here.[1 MB pdf].