Video Digitization

VHS video digitization is unique in very particular ways. Due to the amounts of data being processed, a parade of equipment is required. Even more, its required to work in concert. The potential for headaches is vast. Today we used the combination of a VCR to read the cassette, a DV camcorder acting as intermediary--analog to digital convertor, a mac running Imovie, and finally an external drive to capture and store the raw digital video but the permutations and types of components that can be used are boundless. There are few computer centric tasks that illustrate a data flow as explicitly as capturing video.  You can almost see the bits as they are cajoled to span their electronic equals and moved from the popular magnetic storage of one decade to another.

Analogue to digital video capture is interesting because its requires so much processing power with arguably the least payoff per amount of work done. Because of the complexity of video synced with audio it is difficult, time-consuming, abstruse to enhance or repair in ways that most audio or paper documents just are not. This is attributable to the difficulty in abstracting video. Paper documents can be abstracted, through sophisticated software, into movable text.  Audio is abstracted into a waveform--though maybe the waveform and current technology only permits so much manipulation while opening the door to unnecessary or unintentional distortions. But video does not lend it self to easy visual simplifications. Most often, therefore, it is merely captured, converted and cashed (stored). The properties stem from video's immense data load. This will inevitably be mitigated with advancements in computing power and innovations in video processing and editing software. It does make the mind wander to the innate complexities of other types of media, popular today, and implications for preservation. Some media forms will not only require vast computation to process and archive but networks and maybe even distributed computing systems. The facile example is online games.

BWF Metaedit

Metadata is integral to version and integrity control on the internet.  The Internet is of course the largest most efficient copy apparatus in existence. Digital objects are particular in the fact that when they are duplicated, divided, they retain value without diminishing. Digital objects are distributed through division. In fact, the properties of networked systems in the digital domain are, that a particular object's value is enhanced or multiplied by duplication and circulation. Economists call these network effects. Compare this to a piece of chocolate or oil--the more the chocolate is divided, the more exclusive and expensive it becomes. And after a while, it either disappears, or becomes largely irrelevant as a social artifact. This is a function of scarcity. The only scarcity on the internet is fabricated scarcity derived through public goods problems.  In other words the only reason scarcity exists on the internet is because our current economic model demands it so that people can extract the most value possible from the digital wares in their control. With all this in mind, metadata allows digital objects to retain integrity despite infinite duplication. I imagine there is an existential inquiry lurking somewhere in this discussion.

Metadata can be manipulated and deployed in many ways and through various schemas and standards. It can be confusing and overwhelming. So, it is nice to have a general metadata editor in BWF Metaedit. The program consolidates many metadata fields and presents them for easy editing. And it is open source. I talked about open source in my last blog. This program is a obvious product of that type of development method. It fills a need in a simple efficient way--substance over style. It has a few bugs. I had difficulty displaying some metadata fields and some issues with the program retaining and writing my inputted data. The particular recalcitrant was the ICRD (date created) field. But the fix was as easy as restoring program defaults. That tells me something minor needs to be tweaked. I am unfamiliar with the particulars behind the BWF program, and there are as many open source development models as there are grains of sand on the beach, but the strength of the model is that development is nimble, flexible and, generally, distributed. Another merit to open source, is that the model provides for, well...openness. Generally speaking, these types of projects are very receptive to input. The developers are the users and the users are the developers. And even if you are not a user who can write code, when you discover something broken with the program or something it is lacking, or even something that it would be nice to have, your comments are being  received by your own peer group. My point is, if this is v1.1 (early in is release cycle), I can only imagine how good its later versions will be.  

Audacity

I've had the pleasure of working with Audacity on a few occasions now. In the capacity of hobbyist and in more professional capacities, Audacity has impressed me. The tool itself appears rough. Its functionality, however, is unexpected. It is powerful. Considering its price, these positive qualities are all the more apparent. What would the software world look like, the internet look like, if the free digital culture movement had not adapted to the licensing model that sought to supplant (eradicate) it?  I am just glad the culture, pushed by some intrepid crusaders, retained the ethos of the free and open development models (or are they movements?).

Fun but Fascinating Ramblings

Whatever the type of digitizing, the process depends on a translation of form. This has very interesting social and practical implications beyond the sizable concerns associated with information loss and the uncertainties of digital format longevity. The act of shifting, removing, or abstracting the physical properties of an document distorts meaning. It also enhances meaning. In a way, value is neither destroyed or enhanced, it is just shifted based on cultural practices. It is important to meditate on a few of these points, if only briefly and idly.

If we think of documents as more easily transportable and accessible idea containers, then digitization is merely a method of advancing and augmenting these properties in the digital world. The loss of information and context that results from form distortion, by digitization, results from an imperfect conversion. To me, this is not different from the distortions innate in manifesting pure idea into a socially digestible form via spoken language. It may be arbitrary, but for the case I am making, it is helpful to think of physical forms a containers. Each document is a vessel for ideas, and these ideas can be manifest in a number of ways. But there really is no platonic and perfect from of the idea that exists outside of its physical form. The form adds and diminishes meaning, but, more importantly physical form enables the idea to live in a social environment. The form grants social dimension to the idea.

From a archival perspective, as much as from a IT perspective, the true value of an idea arises from its social and contextual significance. Value accretes as it moves though communities of use and consideration and is linked to other intellectual and physical developments. Context is key. An artifact in a museum setting is decontextualized. This is true whether the curator desires it so or not. Context has to be artificially built around decontextualized documents. This process could reflect an intention to restore context or to construct novel context.

Context emerges through associative information. This information could live in documents and experiences in near physical and intellectual proximity, but not necessarily. It is, however, always outside the and surrounding the document itself. The problems of value and scarcity (both integral to market economies) in the digital world are good examples. Copyright law and ideas of ownership and possession are confounded in the virtual world where nearly anything can exist anywhere at the same time.

Two ways of representing associative information, that come to mind here, are pastiche and palimpsest. Pastiche is a type of idea destruction and recreation. Its often now called remix, or mashup. It provides for the creation of new forms through the appropriation and decontextualizaion of prior forms. Many argue, reasonably, that all human creation is pastiche. In essence, the argument goes, we are all just absorbing ideas that existed before and around us, and through the application of our personality and experiences, combining them under the guise of innovation.

Palimpsest is a type of meaning that accumulates over time. It signifies a cycle of writing, erasing and rewriting. Though, with each new iteration, the old is simultaneously obscured and reincorporated into the new. Think of a once vibrant and vital industrial park that falls on hard times, decays, lies fallow and unused, and then is rehabilitated into trendy shops or lofts. The process tells us more about a city and society that any one instantiation or roll of the physical place and its arrangement.

Metadata is the primary, thought not the only, reflection of the above discussed associative information in digital and digitized documents. It describes a thing so that the thing can be found and used. Sometimes metadata proscribes, other times it prescribes use and meaning. It is always constructed. Thought, often, it is constructed collaboratively, and over time, like the meaning in which the object itself resides.

A few thoughts on Copyright

I experienced a copyright synchronicity today. I am studying copyright culture and policy in another class.  It was good to have a new context and variant perspectives added to a discourse I am otherwise steeped in.  The literature is amazing, insightful, and not at all boring.  I will defer to the professional writers on the topic for analysis.  But, a few contradictions have been piquing at my interest. They are more likely elucidative of human nature that they are of copyright.  Regardless, here they are.

Most original American musical art forms rely on cultures of remixing and revision.  Some of the revision occurred with attribution and permission.  Most did not. Could Jazz happen today under current copyright law?

The copyright holding industries have made a great deal of profit from the use of materials contracted from creators.  They also present themselves to be the representatives and defenders of these creators. I could argue that copyright law has become unwieldy and unkind to artistic creations.  It  makes it more difficult to create. Yet, major copyright holders push for more and more stringent regulation and enforcement.

Most of the industry lobbied to strengthen copyright, form its origins, made a great deal of profit from its laxity at the time that they were emerging.  Thomas Edison, for instance was a great inventor and passionate defender of patent and copyright, but he was also a flagrant copyright/patent thief:
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090808045443AAOmUNs



 

     

Discussion Thread

So, Carlos deftly sidestepped the concept of balance as a rationale for copyright.  I say deftly because it feels (to me) naive and outmoded to conduct a useful analysis of general copyright policy under the consideration of interest balancing. I believe this for two reasons. One is the general inertia of the legislature and the judiciary to further limit and constrain the interest of end users, particularly in regard to digital materials, while expanding the coverage and terms of copyright.  Second, is the fact that for balance to occur, you need parts wtih opposing interests to seek compromise. Mostly, I'm not sure the general public has genuine representation.

Balance, however is essentual to copyright exceptions like fair use, which are in turn, essential to non-profit digitization and online access projects.  I believe fair use was developed to accommodate libraries and other cultural institutions in the early days of copyright legislation.  My concern is, that with the general government trends towards austerity, and the dire consequences for cultural institutions, the historical expansion of copyright, the lobby power of the media industries, and (arguably) public indifference, is fair use becoming an artifact of the past?   What does this mean for preservation?  Do we need a reaffirmed, more clearly described statutory version of fair use? If so, where will this push come from and with sort of coalition will it be?  Or, would eliminating the vagaries surrounding fair use be detrimental to people with a more hesitant approach to copyright expansion and encroachment?

ABBYY

If I could enumerate my first OCR ABBYY experience in the tone of a survival log, it would go something like this:


Day 1: Today I awoke, confused and not without a vague fear, on some alien beach. Though, I survived the crash. I guess I should count myself fortunate. While I am destitute and lost, I am ALIVE. Though what kind of life awaits?
Day 2:  Upon initial survey of my beach (as I have come to call it) and its close environs, my spirits are much improved.  This place is a variable Eden and if I am to be a lone Adam, at least I will be just as well nourished.  Tomorrow I will build a shelter and put my claim on this place in earnest.   
Day 3: Disaster! The fruit I collected is poisonous.  I am double wrecked.  On top of these misfortunes, my shelter is slow in coming and storm is on the horizon. 
Day 4:  ...Why me!? All is lost...

Maybe that was a bit dramatic.  Anyways, here's my evaluation of my first experience OCRing  about 70 typed pages.  It started off pretty good, running thought the pages I had previously scanned, using the spell checker to review and adjust the low confidence characters.  Then I realized that ABBYY assigned different classes to features of a scanned objects. So, ABBYY will sometimes see a header or a title and assign it a "title text" value and then assign the body a "body text" value.  Fine.  Except that text considered "title" is ascribed a value that makes it UNMOVABLE.  I am sure that there is a perfectly good reason for this...no, no, its really stupid.  Why would anyone, ever, want static text on a computer? Plus, its inconsistent, some pages it will identify a title text box and on others it will treat the entire document as body text.

Words are hardly adiquate to express my frustration after I completed OCRing a 37 pp document only to discover that the "title" text was completely useless.  When converting the text to a word document, ABBYY passes the "title" text's opaque and untouchable (to me) properties over.  This has dire effects on page and text position.  Sometimes body text would be superimposed over the title text.  So I had to go back and repeat about an hour of work to hack the document into editable form. I was also unsuccessful at finding a way to default all character types to "body" to automate, and expedite the process.  

I know most of my gripes grow out of my ignorance of and inexperience with the software.  I will say, though, that even when I did find a good routine for processing the text, I still felt like I was hacking the software--fighting with it to make it do what I wanted. Not intuitive.  Of course, when I say hacking, I mean in the traditional sense of the word that implies curious, healthy exploration of technology, not the sense that people that drink deeply of the fox news cool-aid would understand.  I love to hack, but not when I have a pile of menial labor to grind through.  I felt like an operator removed, like I was driving ABBY from the back seat with broom sticks and mirrors.

Not fun...

The transcripts however...  What wonderful tails of oil conquest, labor issues, drunk dogs, Howard Hughes and snakes.  Reading the transcripts, I felt a distant connection with my departed paternal grandparents.  They were not involved in the oil industry, but lived in Amarillo.  Their reason, sensibility, practicality, ingenuity was detectable  in the rhythm and spirit of speech of the various transcribed conversations.  The experience brought me face to face with importance of this work--albeit a personal reason.  So, ABBY be damned, I will soldier on.