Getting Started (all users)

Use the AVAnnotate Documentation for technical help on using the AVAnnotate application.

Guiding Questions for Project Creators

  • Audience: Who is your audience? What do they care about? What are their interests and concerns?
  • Material: What is your material? Where is your material? Do you have public access? How many AV events and items are you planning to include? How might these events and items correspond to one another? Do you want to include images?
  • Process: Do you have collaborators? Do you have outside resources you want to consider, such as scholarship or protocols?
  • Argument: What do you want your audience to know about these materials? How do you want them to know this information? By simply providing the media or by adding annotations, indexed terms, essays, or images?

Responsible Use

  • Be aware of accessibility needs: Is the project set up so that all users can access the information? Are transcripts created for screen readers and alternative text for images?

It can make sense to generate initial transcripts using AI-based tools. Ensure that the tool that is used has an appropriate privacy policy for the included materials. Transcripts should be reviewed by the researcher for accuracy. For an AVAnnotate project, machine-generated transcripts, metadata, or annotations should be clearly provenanced with the service, version, and date of generation. They should be uploaded as separate Annotation Sets to make it easy to differentiate in the user interface who (or what) generated them.

  • Be aware of media accessibility sensitivities: Is the AV material restricted for sensitivity or copyright restrictions? Should content/trigger warnings be included? How is harm (in how the AV may have been collected and in the AV to potential audiences) addressed and has context about that harm been included in the project? What are the fair use boundaries for the media? Is it appropriate to get permissions?

Recent targeting of projects in cultural institutions has added a new emphasis and urgency to provide strategies for sharing sensitive AV resources and annotations and context around those resources using offline strategies. Because access to many AV materials is already restricted to reading rooms, and access to AVAnnotate projects built on that material was a goal from the start of the project, we have strategies in place to allow researchers to build and share offline projects. For more information, see the documentation on Private projects and Creating Offline or Alternative Server Projects.

  • Make project goals and expectations explicit: Ask “Why am I building this project?” and include project goals, expectations for engagement, AV context information, and a rationale in an introduction.
  • Include geedback loops and reciprocity: Document projects and workflows and share them on an “About this project” page with proper citations. Share annotated projects and contribute use cases to public repositories. Connect through community networks and digital scholarship forums.

Project Sustainability

Stakeholders should prepare for their project’s sustainability from the start including how to ingest content into long-term institutional repositories (IR). It is the responsibility of the project creator to create a preservable package – based on the guidelines in Sustainability – and hand the project off to the IR with appropriate metadata to preserve. If the creator does not have access to an IR, the project can be saved an external drive or other media storage according to the instructions on Creating Offline or Alternative Server Projects.