New article by CATS and HRA members

The edited volume “Bilddaten in den Digitalen Geisteswissenschaften/ Image data in the digital humanities” features a selection of presentations from the workshop “Image Data in the Digital Humanities and Cultural Studies - Interoperability and Retrieval", which was hosted in October 2017 by the Collaborative Research Centre "Episteme in motion" (Free University of Berlin) together with DARIAH-DE. The book is part of Harrassowitz series "Episteme in Bewegung. Beiträge zu einer transdisziplinären Wissensgeschichte" and is available open access (PDF here). In addition to the results of the workshop, the volume comprises a number of new contributions in the field of Digital Humanities. Among these, is an article written by HRA and CATS members Matthias Arnold, Hans Martin Krämer, Hanno Lecher, Jan Scholz, Max Stille, and Sebastian Vogt on "Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Videoannotation mit Pan.do/ra – Forschung, Lehre und institutionelles Repositorium/Possibilities and limits of video annotation with Pan.do/ra – research, teaching and institutional repository."

Pan.do/ra is an open source platform that has been in use at the HCTS since 2010. It allows multiple users to simultaneously apply different types of annotation layers to freely selected sections of a video. The spectrum of projects realized with the system is broad and ranges from Musicology, Ethnology and History to Islamic studies, Sinology, Japanese Studies and Art History. In addition, Pan.do/ra has also been used as a media repository for the HCTS e-journal, the Journal of Transcultural Studies. The service, formerly hosted by the HRA at the HCTS, is now provided by the IT-department of the Centre for East Asian Studies (ZO) and available to all CATS members.

The article illustrates the application and implementation of the video annotation database in different contexts where the use of moving image material is required. By bringing together disciplinary perspectives from Transcultural Studies, Islamic Studies, and Japanese Studies with insights from Library Science, Information Science, and Digital Humanities, the piece offers a critical review of different ways of adopting digital technologies in teaching, research, and institutional work.

For requests regarding use and access to the video annotation database, please contact Sebastian Vogt (sebastian.vogt@uni-heidelberg.de) or Matthias Arnold (matthias.arnold@uni-hd.de).