Sound and Vision starts development annotation game for video

January 6th 2009

Audience participation is one of the major topics within the Images for the Future projects. Earlier, the audience was invited to participate in the completion of collection knowledge (Sound and Vision Wiki) and the metadating of photo collections (National Archive on Flickr The Commons). This year Sound and Vision – in cooperation with broadcasting company KRO and the VU University Amsterdam – launches a new Images for the Future project concerning audience participation: an annotation game for video, where the internet audience add keywords to audio-visual archive material in a game-like setting.

The cooperation between Sound and Vision and KRO was established during a joint participation in the Total Content Recommendation research project, run by the Telematicia Institute. The goal of the project was to look at the possibilities of connecting to the current developments within the web 2.0 landscape, among which are social tagging. However, there are many questions about the quality and added value of ‘audience metadata’. Furthermore, it is not yet clear which are the appropriate models to enthuse the audience and get them to invest their rare free time. Within the cluster “social tagging and crowd sourcing” the Images for the Future consortium try to gain more insight in these issues, and to subsequently share this knowledge.

Because of their shared intention to gain short-term practical experience with audience descriptions of audio-visual material, Sound and Vision and KRO decided to join forces. Inspired by the work of the scientist Luis von Ahn, KRO already had the idea to ‘tempt’ the audience into annotating archive material in a playful way. Concerning photo collections, fun and play is already being used as a successful motivation within various initiatives, but Sound and Vision and KRO are the first institutes to use an annotation game for video to enrich the metadata of their own collection with audience descriptions.

The development of the game is in the hands of the innovative Internet company Q42 in The Hague. The entire Images for the Future consortium are able to use the underlying technology of the game for additional collections. On the basis of the experiences of Sound and Vision and KRO a report will be made about the experiences with audience contribution to the metadata of audio-visual archive material and the motivating role of fun and play. A data set of the collected audience annotations will be made available by the VU University Amsterdam for scientific research. The platform is to be launched this spring.

For more information: Maarten Brinkerink (mbrinkerink [at] beeldengeluid.nl)