Impact
eVIR will strengthen research areas (teaching, learning and instruction, psychological health) that already has high standing and priority in Norway and abroad by making it more comparable, shareable and longitudinal – thus making it more attractive (added value and lower costs) for international collaboration. At another level one of the outcomes of eVIR is to provide new infrastructure solutions for contextual data as an input to ongoing policies (Road Maps for Research Infrastructure).
eVIR will advance educational research (teaching and instruction) and research in clinical psychology by facilitating collaboration, long term accessibility, international profiling and a “division of expertise” between different research groups. A major contribution would be to bring research practices in the humanities and social sciences more in line with the new policies of “open access”
Relevance
The project eVIR (eInfrastructure for VIdeo Research) will 1) Develop a new national eInfrastructure for research with contextsensitive data (video data) that provide flexible solutions at different levels of security and 2) facilitate storage solutions that support accessibility and interoperability. Although it is mainly located in educational research and clinical psychological research , the project could be seen as a “test case” of technological facilities and procedures for the processing of sensitive contextual datasources in the social sciences, the humanities and health research, where this type of research has grown quite dramatically, partly as a result of a stronger emphasis on micro-studies: Research on surgeons at work, collaboration among scientists, interactions between teachers and pupils, patients and therapists, performing artists, children navigating on the web or talking in museums etc.
Main Challenges
Storage capacity. The capturing of learning processes often means high quality video recording over extended time periods, thus generating a need for video storage of a sufficient scale and reliability. The storage systems could be online (fast use for production level work), near line (hierarchical archiving with time defined automatic transfer to external tape device) or offline (transfer to tape with manual content restoration).
Video indexing, coding and editing is quite crucial as the amount of rich data increases nonlinear and multi-channel editing systems have become standard tools in many environments, but not common in video-based research. Smart video editing software and scripting languages could facilitate segmentation and identification of component elements that are suitable for browsing, indexing, search and retrieval of objects, scenes and events.
Video analysis. In the educational sciences machine generated data has become more and more important for analytic purposes (for ex. log files in tracing students’ activities on the web). There is a need for automatic and semi-automatic coding and the use of “intelligent agents” for example in comparison of cases. Analytic tools should also allow researchers to make use of shared coding schemes for classifications and comparison of data across datasets. Existing tools for this purpose are often tailormade for specific data types and hard to integrate across datasets.
Video sharing is hampered by the lack of integrated tools that could support publishing, commentary, criticism, hyper linking and XML standardized referencing of the multimedia data produced (Pea & Hoffert, 2009). There is also a need for metadata schema that define rights-related parameters, copyright information, production data, contractual usage restrictions, time codes and scripts related to the content.
The issue of video security is a consistent concern that involves two strategies; one of containment and one of watermarking. The first is the most common and involves encrypting and licensing, whereas the latter provides information that signals to a device that a file is copy protected etc. As pointed out above, one of the major challenges in this area is the flexible use of both permissive and restricted policies that meet updated legal and ethical standards.