AVAnnotate Glossary

Annotation: Annotations are user-created and correspond to a point of time or a range of time in the audio or video. Technically, annotations include time-stamps, annotation bodies of different types (e.g., transcripts, captions, or notes), and index terms. They refer to contextual information about the media. Annotation types might include the words people say (the transcript or captions); descriptions of historical and cultural contexts or about what is happening in the media; information about features of the media (e.g., shot sequence, volume, or lighting); notes about the quality of the media; or conceptual notes or themes among a wide range of possible topics.

Annotation Set: Annotation sets refer to a grouping of annotations that can be associated with a given media. Every annotation is part of an annotation set. Like using different index terms or tags, users might choose to create different annotation sets for filtering annotations in the published project based on annotation types, language, or annotation creator. One annotation set could be in English, for example, and one annotation set in Spanish, or there could be different annotation sets for transcripts and caption annotations. Collaborators can also upload different annotation sets for each collaborator. Tags and tag groups can be associated with particular annotation sets, and annotation sets can be filtered separately on the published site.

AV Items: AV items in AVAnnotate refer to audiovisual moving-image or sound artifacts. In AVAnnotate, annotations are associated with timestamps that correspond to these time-based artifacts. AVAnnotate does not store AV items. If AV items are freely available online and playable, they can be referenced as links in an AVAnnotate project. Users may still create and display indexable, time-stamped annotations for Offline Media that cannot be referenced online for privacy, copyright, or other reasons (such as the lack of a digital asset). In these cases, a media player will not appear on the published page, but the annotations will appear.

Data Manager: The AVAnnotate workspace to create and manage project data: Events (and their AV files), annotations, annotation sets, and project tags.

Event: The Event refers to any occasion that the project creator seeks to present to an audience. Events are a central conceptual element of a project and could comprise a single or multiple AV files, which may be optionally associated with annotations. Events might include a conference of different panels and speakers or, more typically, a single speaker’s presentation. In some scholarly use cases, an event could include different versions of a poet reading her poetry. In each case, the project creator determines the scope and definition of their “events.”

Index: The index is a set of auto-generated pages that organizes and visualizes tag groups and tags across the project, allowing users to search, filter, and compare annotations, tags, and tag groups.

Pages: Pages are the building blocks of a project, and are either auto-generated or custom-generated.

Project: The published project comprises a home page, internal page(s), and an index (if tags are present).

Project Dashboard: The project dashboard is the backend management site for projects under development. The dashboard allows users to create projects, select projects to edit, edit project details, include collaborators, and publish projects.

Site Builder: The AVAnnotate workspace used to build and publish the public-facing site by creating auto-generated and custom pages and then selecting a publishing option (such as private and offline.

Tag: Tags are user-generated labels that allow indexing, organizing, and filtering topics in the annotations on the published site. Tags may represent a single event or may be associated with multiple events across the project.

Tag Group: Groups can be used to organize tags for filtering.