Mapping Online Video Repositories: A Resource Discovery Framework for Teaching with Multimedia
Michael V. Miller & Anna
CohenMiller
Abstract
The explosive growth of online video in recent years presents both opportunities and challenges for those teaching sociology. While multimedia resources on the Internet abound, discovering and accessing those that are teaching-relevant remains a significant barrier to instructional integration. By way of a comprehensive framework based on Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology, this paper introduces a systematic approach to curating Online Video Repositories (OVRs)—websites, blogs, and video channels that aggregate and stream digital content. Moreover, to demonstrate the practical utility of this system, we offer a substantial body of sociologically-relevant OVRs, including limited discussion of some in terms of their instructional value.
Keywords: online video, RSS, video pedagogy, curation, multimedia
1. Introduction
The state of educational video has been radically transformed. Sociology instructors today face a stark contrast to the video scarcity of the early 2000s, now having access to an overwhelming abundance of relevant content. Commercial websites ceaselessly upload new material, while user-sharing platforms host an ever expanding array of professional and amateur productions, including news reports, interviews, speeches, lectures, demonstrations, social experiments, documentaries, movie and television clips, and specialized instructional content of all sorts. Digital advances over the period have furthermore largely eliminated the technical barriers that once impeded video integration in education. Vastly improved Internet infrastructure and video coding innovations have made streaming highly efficient for most users.
However, the sheer volume of available content has created a new challenge: effective discovery and curation of quality materials. Consistently identified as a major obstacle to full instructional adoption (Kaufman and Mohan 2009, Marquis, Wojcik, Lin, and McKinnon 2020), the problem has become even more acute following the 2020 mass transition to remote teaching, which underlined the immediacy for access to quality digital resources (Fyfield, Henderson, and Phillips 2021, Nguyen 2022). Nonetheless, instructors often invest considerable time searching through vast amounts of online content, frequently with minimal returns.
We argue that the primary impediment to effective video integration is not technological shortcomings nor content scarcity, but rather an obsolete approach to curation. The discipline, and for that matter the other social sciences too, has not fully recognized the need to effectively process the substantial video output created by instructors and academically-inspired video creators, nor has it realized the utility of employing already available digital tools that could help with this task. While pioneering efforts in online video curation began fifteen years ago with The Sociological Cinema (Andrist, Chepp, and Dean), those who would curate video for instructors lack a comprehensive, but simple, framework for reasonably addressing the constant deluge of contemporary output. As a result, instructors are rarely familiar with those resources that might best help them spark students' sociological imaginations.
In our opinion, the fundamental problem is that current resource management and curation efforts focus on individual videos rather than considering the broader context of content distribution. This atomistic approach limits not only the sustained use of valuable video resources in sociology education, but their initial discovery. While individual video curation efforts may point instructors to worthy materials, the exponential growth in available content demands a more systematic approach. Traditional methods of discovering and sharing educational videos, focused on individual pieces of content, are inadequate for addressing the scale and complexity of current digital output.
Our paper advances the cause of video curation by employing video-related websites, blogs, and channels as the primary unit of analysis. Whereas curation has historically centered on specific content, we shift attention to the distributional context through which digital film is now made accessible to users: Online Video Repositories (OVRs), our term for sites hosting aggregated digital film available for on-demand streaming.
An OVR-centered curation approach has the potential to quickly advance the productive employment of video in physical and online classrooms in at least two basic ways. By being explicitly directed to quality collections, instructors can come to know those sites appropriate to their teaching interests. Widening curational scope from single videos to aggregates of videos axiomatically encourages instructors to expand inspection to the corpus of content located there. As instructors become familiar with the work of particular video-makers, they may come to anticipate and even encourage future creative efforts. Such interactions will foster online creator-instructor networks (see Palmer and Schueths 2013), key to further motivating and sustaining video-production activity.
Second, centering on OVRs rather than single videos will facilitate the mechanics of curation and thereby markedly enhance our ability to bring quality film to discipline attention. In this paper, we employ RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a digital application that can systematically link and organize websites, video channels, and blogs in a clean window interface. RSS permits immediate video identification and access from a common web location. Moreover, the OVR landscape that we map through our application of choice, Protopage, has the capacity to capture continual change as videos are uploaded at monitored sites, and as curators add new OVRs and just-found older ones to existing RSS pages. This approach can create, in effect, living archives to serve ongoing curation activity.
Several years ago, we began to examine OVRs by looking at open-access (i.e., free) video repositories across the social sciences (see Miller and CohenMiller 2019). However, that research provided extremely uneven coverage as we included only a handful of sites specifically centered on sociology. Focused search activity since then has revealed about one-hundred and fifty more created mainly by sociology instructors, primarily targeting sociology students. We have additionally uncovered a similar number of OVRs from related social sciences that would provide ancillary teaching support in sociology courses. Although many sites doubtless remain to be discovered with ongoing search, we believe this sample is of sufficient size and diversity to allow for meaningful generalizations about the current state of sociologically-relevant online video.
In this paper, we largely engage in descriptive curation by locating, organizing, and displaying OVRs, but we also perform limited evaluation by recommending certain sites for further inspection. Hypertext links to sociology OVRs and their most recently uploaded videos are made available through RSS. Discussion is then directed to a limited subset of sociology OVRs that appear to be particularly serviceable as instructor resources. Given that understanding human behavior transcends disciplinary boundaries, we also display OVRs from related social sciences through RSS pages and explicitly identify those appearing to have the most potential for employment in sociology courses. Finally, we focus on OVRs more precisely for purposes of teaching application within discipline subfields. To illustrate, we aggregate academic and nonacademic OVRs together in a single RSS page that might assist those who teach courses related to social stratification.
Curatorial Dimensions of Online
Video Repositories
OVRs are created by diverse
entities (individuals, corporations, non-profits, governments) for many different purposes (art, entertainment, commerce, politics). Those educational in nature are of specific interest to us, and our attention is
largely directed to them. By far, most OVRs of this type are video
channels on user-sharing platforms and virtually all of these are on YouTube.
OVRs that also engage in video curation, on the other hand, tend to be located
on either freestanding websites or blogs, both of which permit greater production freedom and better accommodate important features such as tag collections and hypertext links to collateral resources. OVRs accompanied by explicit learning instructions can have exceptional utility for adopting instructors. The Sociological Cinema and Popular Sociology, the two major sociology sites based on collaborative curation (i.e., user-submitted video) are hosted on websites which feature teaching applications accompanying linked videos. Nevertheless, OVR creators seldomly include directions on how their videos might be didactically employed.
Some video curators may be video creators, but most creators do not curate videos in a strict sense. Video curation involves a variety of functional tasks related to the display and description of film resources. It certainly includes organizing materials in a coherent, accessible manner in order to inform others about them, and in this sense, video creators and even instructors play a limited curatorial role in aligning videos to audiences. However, curation is understood to entail more involved efforts, including content synopsis, synthesis, and recommendation. Video curation moreover is often taken to mean a process generally undertaken by third parties who mediate between video product and target audiences of potential viewers, specifically enumerating strengths and weaknesses of such content in light of perceived viewer interests and needs.
A significant dimension for OVR curation relates to the type of sourced content aggregated in the collection. OVRs are primarily comprised
of original video and/or found video. The
former is new video produced by or for an OVR, and often when done for instructors is in the form of
lecture captures, speeches and interviews, screen-captures of presentation-based lectures and tutorials, concept explainers, etc. Found video is appropriated from elsewhere online. It may
include any of the types of film just mentioned that are created by others in
addition to news stories and movies, television programs, and documentaries or
clips derived from them. The presentation of found video in such contexts can be understood as having curatorial meaning to the extent that developers make it a point to say something meaningful about
them. Hybrid or remix video is a third less
common type which combines found-video clips in new video form made by the OVR
creator, and is often used for purposes of videographic criticism or social
protest (see the discussion on detournement at Andrist, Chepp, Dean, and Miller 2014).
A practical way to approach video curation is in terms of levels of curational inclusiveness. Curation of sociology teaching-film has largely taken the route of the lowest level: the video, the clip, the documentary. the movie—either as single entities (see such and such) or as multiple videos on the same or similar topics (see so and so), although the latter are not usually multiple pieces of content from the same creator or distributor. The second level moves higher in organizational abstraction by virtue of addressing the collections in which single videos are distributed—the OVR. Within this context, curators can indicate all sorts of relevant qualitative and quantitative dimensions and changes. A relevant intermediary level of organization between first and second levels is the playlist—a feature that YouTube has institutionalized within OVRs that provides greater organizational coherence, usually by topic or theme, within the video channel.
Another important curatorial consideration is the extent to which content is made publicly accessible and also freely accessible. In general, OVRs are open access in
the sense of being available at no cost to users, and that is particularly the
case for educational OVRs where audiences range from just instructors' students all the way up to large bodies of diverse collectivities, perhaps even including non-academic audiences. While access to
video from many for-profit OVRs is often restricted by paywalls, nonsubscribers can sometimes view at least some of that content through alternative Internet platforms. Instructors and students can likewise tap into huge
collections of documentary film, such as those at Alexander Street, Kanopy, and
Films On Demand, through subscriptions purchased by their college libraries.
While increasing numbers of students are no doubt being asked to take out
semester-long subscriptions to Netflix or other popular streaming sites, instructors should become aware of no-cost alternative collections of shorts and full-length documentaries such as those identified in our RSS pages.
political ideology
Grassere, J. (Nov 11 2023). Nebula: What does creator owned mean? Diggit Magazine https://www.diggitmagazine.com/articles/nebula-what-does-creator-owned-mean
Follow up with categories employed in (a.) sociology OVRs and Video curation sites from other disciplines...
Additional ways OVRs can be
differentiated for curation purposes include quantitative distinctions (video
number, video length, recency of upload), as well as qualitative
ones--discipline and subfield relevance, video format (filmed, photo
presentation, animation, etc.), and types of information conveyed in video
relevant to specific learning goals [elaborate] (see Andrist et al 2014).
Ideological / quality / etc...
Finally, curator
assessment of YouTube collections, as well as single videos from them, can
be augmented by audience-response indicators, such as "likes," viewer
and subscriber numbers, and viewer comments.
A central task in developing a practical pedagogy is therefore to propose systematic strategies to bring meaning, order, and appropriate use to this rapidly expanding, undifferentiated mass. In our opinion, at least three questions warrant current attention: how can online video be (1) addressed in a mechanical sense; (2) conceptualized relative to sociological content; and (3) applied for purposes of teaching and learning?
The first question, although beyond the purview of the immediate paper, relates to building skills in resource acquisition and management, and speaks to the fact that online video is highly accessible, portable, and transformable. Mechanical proficiency begins with recognition that such video can be configured within the larger Internet environment, which can then multiply its teaching and learning potential. One promising schema in this regard comes from the online-learning literature and treats video as the subject within the context of an inclusive multimedia generating and processing system (see Miller, 2011). The procurement, curation, and employment of video are thus seen as being enhanced through systematic adoption of various cloud applications—including RSS feeds, social bookmarking services, converters and editors, and content distribution technologies—which will help transform instructors into efficient users, and possibly also active producers of relevant content.
While developing mechanical skills are important, enlisting online video as a teaching resource is an even more compelling justification for a practical pedagogy. In this vein, we should first note that despite the absence of treatment within the sociology journal literature (for a recent exception, see Caldeira and Ferrante 2012), sociologists are nonetheless beginning to bring online video materials to the attention of peers. Such efforts are apparent in multimedia blogs for the discipline (e.g., DJ Academe; Sociological Images) and subfields (e.g., SoUnequal), as well as in various resource directories (e.g., Sociology through Documentary Film; Miller 2009, Appendix E). However, the most ambitious attempt to make online content easily accessible and also generate interest in using video for teaching began in 2010 with creation of The Sociological Cinema (TSC). This online video clip repository, consisting of user-contributed links relevant to varied sociological topics, has a collection to date in excess of 400 clips with each accompanied by description of conceptual relevance and classroom application.
In light of emerging instructor interest in employing online media as evidenced by the fast growing TSC inventory, in conjunction with the fact that the Internet offers virtually limitless materials to draw from, we believe that the time is right to begin thinking about film content in a more nuanced manner than that provided in the existing literature. Although previous articles in Teaching Sociology reflected consistent interest in how film could promote teaching and learning, they were largely case studies confined to the classroom use of one or no more than several popular fiction movies within a given course. The few studies that addressed larger collections of media likewise provide little help, as the kinds they examined were largely invariant. For example, Burton (1988) identified over 170 films as having relevance for sociology classes, and placed them in almost 40 categories according to subfield relevance. However, virtually all titles were popular fiction movies. Similarly, Baker-Sperry, Behringer, and Grauerholz (1999) examined 20 films on gender-related issues, then classified them according to application to prominent concepts within this subfield. Yet, all of their films were documentaries. We are not aware of any studies in the teaching-with-film literature from other disciplines that have attempted to draw distinctions between different types of video content, much less generate comparisons relative to their varying didactic strengths.
Video Curation Sites
1. identification
2. preparation
3. aggregation
4. selection
5. application
6. interaction
7. transmission
8. contribution
https://www.classcentral.com/report/best-sociology-courses/#penn
Finding Video Resources
Instructors discover film materials
for their classes with varying degrees of success, often relying on serendipity while Internet surfing or recommendations from colleagues and students. When
actively seeking videos to match specific teaching needs, most instructors turn
to search engines, particularly Google.
However, instructors should also be mindful of the value of YouTube, notwithstanding common criticisms against it [footnote, also include Sciliano piece] The largest video-sharing platform on the web, YouTube hosts an extensive array of educational channels, but several other features likewise facilitate curation. First, YouTube forwards new video to video channel subscribers through its notification function ... location... When users select specific videos, its recommendation algorithm automatically generates lists of suggested content--with the first few pieces often being of higher quality than initially selected videos. YouTube also gives creators the option of arranging content into playlists, video subcategories, which can improve OVR organizational coherence and navigability. A "featured channels" list allows creators to showcase others' video sites thereby potentially fostering networked learning communities. Premium YouTube subscribers additionally have an "Ask" function available, allowing them to harness artificial intelligence to interrogate individual video. Finally, given that managers at many media outlets operating behind paywalls recognize the educational and promotional value of YouTube, maintaining parallel YouTube channels has become common. A prime example of this is The New York Times, through which massive amounts of news footage, opinion-film pieces, and documentaries are freely accessible.
Searching alternative platforms to YouTube can also be fruitful [Vimeo, Daily Motion, etc]. Online curation sites generic to the Internet as a whole can further enhance locating OVRs. Boclips offers educational videos curated.... Video aggregators, such as Digg and Pocket, also collect and categorize video content from across the web. Media-relevant websites and blogs, such as Diggit Magazine, regularly feature high-quality educational videos. Unsurpassed among these in our opinion is Colman's Open Culture. Newsletter subscriptions (e.g., Retro Report) provide periodic email updates on new media. Additionally, exploring award-bestowing sites and their newsletters, such as Peabody Matters, can lead to critically-acclaimed educational content.
In addition to these approaches, we encourage the adoption of RSS as a location strategy. Given that curators typically incorporate those OVRs that are the most instructionally relevant into their RSS pages... automatically notifies subscribers of new content
from chosen providers, the need for manual checking is eliminated. This makes
RSS a highly efficient method for discovering new videos as they are uploaded
to OVRs. [elaborate]
Navigating
RSS
We have created RSSMiller&CohenMiller2024 to facilitate access to OVRs
and other media-relevant resources. These pages, developed with Protopage, offer selections
of websites and video channels, organized by topic for easy browsing and
viewing. Start by clicking on Sociology OVRs to access sociology-specific
video repositories, and then note the following points:
1. Page: This page displays about 150 sociology-related sites arranged in three alphabetically ordered columns.
(a) Scroll through columns to
explore different OVR sources.
(b) Note alphabetical order to
quickly find specific content providers.
2. Widgets: Each widget (content provider) shows the latest 20 videos uploaded to its
respective source.
(a)
Scroll within widget to view video titles (grab vertical scroller on
right-side of widget).
(b) Hover cursor over video title to see a video's length of time on site.
(c) Click on video title to start immediate streaming.
(d) Click on widget title to visit the OVR.
(e) The
final widget in the last column contains playlists on various sociology topics,
offering thematically organized content derived from other OVRs not listed on
the page as widgets.
3.
Tabs: Note the tabs organized near the top of any page. These, in effect, are
folders by topic. Click on any folder
title to go to relevant widgets.
By utilizing these pages, a substantial amount of sociology-related video content can be displayed and accessed. Although instructors should check back regularly, as widgets automatically update to display the latest videos from each OVR. However, We encourage instructors to create their own RSS pages with this free application in order to personalize search activity.
Video Curation in Sociology
Video curation in our discipline
primarily has been effected through a single journal and a handful of websites
and blogs created by sociology instructors or those with sociology
training. The journal, Teaching Sociology (TS), has long
promoted scholarship on the instructional use of film. TS has
published many articles about how the employment of video can generally
facilitate teaching and learning, and in particular, how it can enhance
the ability of students to think sociologically (see Belet 2017, Besek and
Pandey 2022, Dowd 1999, Hoffman 2006, Prendergast 1986, among others). The journal has
also extensively explored the application of popular media to particular
courses, such as introductory sociology (Belet 2017, Smith
1973), theory (Fails, 1988, Pelton 2013), research methods (Leblanc 1998,
Tan and Ko, 2004), and race and ethnic relations (Dagaz and Harger 2011, Khanna and Harris 2014, Loewen 1991, Stout, Earnhart, and Nagi 2020, Valdez and Halley 1999). In
addition, TS has provided reviews of particular documentaries
and collections of documentaries specific to certain teaching subfields
(e.g., Grauerholz and Covert 1997, Baker-Sperry, Behringer, and Grauerholz
1999), and in 2011 formalized this practice by instituting a film review
section as a regular feature. Most recently, TS began reviewing documentaries available through major streaming platforms (see, e.g., Brutlag 2021, Smith, Smith, and Kozimor 2024). However, publications about OVRs are notably
scarce. To our knowledge, TS has only addressed one online
video-related site: The Sociological Cinema, and that in an article published over a decade ago (see Caldeira and Ferrante 2012).
Although instructors in some disciplines, such as economics, are regularly informed of emerging online video, those teaching sociology have been offered at best only limited, piecemeal guidance.
Curation of online video resources
applicable to courses in our discipline currently resides in two realms quite
different from the kind of curation evident in Teaching Sociology.
The first is reflected in efforts of sociology instructors to translate
online video, primarily short clips, into forms directly employable in
teaching. The second is apparent in the work of curators interested in using
sociologically-informed criticism to address popular culture, especially that
related to blockbuster movies.
The former, instructor-focused
curation, is embodied in two websites: The Sociological Cinema and Popular
Sociology. Pioneering the curation of found video for the discipline in
2010, The
Sociological Cinema (TSC)
was developed by Lester Andrist, Valerie Chepp, and Paul Dean, then
University of Maryland graduate-student instructors. The site quickly built a
critical mass of content based on collaborative curation that asked
contributors to not only volunteer links to relevant videos but also to specify
how such videos could be applied to teaching. In addition to being
featured in TS, TSC received additional attention through laudatory
review articles (see xy and z) and by winning the 2012 MERLOT Sociology Award. The
website also includes a blog, an images section, and a set of modules featuring
multimedia clustered around major sociological concepts. Although growing
little since 2016, TSC remains a valuable instructor resource with a body of
over 600 pieces of content.
At present, the only active instructor-focused
site dedicated to curating found-video is Popular Sociology, started in 2017 by Widener
University sociologist Matt Reid. This site now numbers over 250 user-submitted
found videos and learning applications, and also like TSC, has not
made curation of OVRs a practice.
ShortCutsTV... see blog there... and curation of own video...
Sites that engage in online
critical analysis of popular media have proliferated across the Internet in
recent years. Two of the best offering sociologically-informed criticism in
video form are The Pop
Culture Detective and
Sociocinema. Created and narrated by Jonathan McIntosh, the
former "...explores the intersections of sociology, masculinity,
politics, and entertainment." Although not a sociologist by training,
McIntosh demonstrates keen skills in sociological storytelling as is evident in
this remix about how the animated movie Wall-E exemplifies common assumptions held by sociologists about the nature of social reality (see McIntosh 2017). However, most of his work
centers on deconstructing movies from a critical gender perspective. For
example, his recent video on the megahit Barbie (McIntosh 2024) identifies key representations
of patriarchy and their effects on diverse types of people appearing in the
film. Characterized by strong production values, his content is clear,
detailed, and well-grounded conceptually. Website posts also include key references,
opportunities for subtitling contributions, and hyperlinks to download options,
reflecting his long-standing advocacy of fair use. McIntosh's YouTube channel, featuring over 40 remixes to
date, has amassed more than one million subscribers.
Sociocinema, the Jake Bishop website, and
his YouTube
channel, likewise
illustrate the utility of inspecting films through a sociological lens.
However, while McIntosh focuses on gender issues, Bishop's work has wider
relevance for students new to sociology by describing how a broad array
of sociological concepts are embedded in popular media. Two remix
vehicles that well-illustrate how Bishop integrates sociology with videographic
criticism include Joker Explained (Bishop 2022) and The Rise of Super Rich Satire
Explained (Bishop 2023), an analysis of the growing trend in film to depict the wealthy in unflattering terms. Bishop's YouTube channel has
more than 35,000 subscribers and almost 30 videos to date.
The Sociologist's Dojo blog, maintained by Brian Brutlag since 2013, provides in-depth analysis of media, particularly movies, from a sociological perspective. The blog's detailed posts, which range from monthly to quarterly updates, incorporate complex analyses with references to cultural criticism and feminist theory.
[Mention blogs that have attempted to curate online video. For example, Nathan Palmer (2010-2012) Sociology Source: Videos for Class (https://thesocietypages.org/sociologysource/category/videos-for-class/) and .... Sociological Images contributions related to videographic criticism (e.g., see Nord 2023) (Jillian Nord 2023 https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2023/07/11/them-ms-sexualized-media-and-emphasized-femininity/) also see Evan Stewart 2023 Cheeseburger Culture https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2024/07/17/cheeseburger-culture/) and see videographic criticism via Graham Nielsen 2020 The Hidden Cost of Your New Wardrobe (https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2020/06/25/the-hidden-cost-of-your-new-wardrobe/).
Also need to include TRAILS and specific contributions of instructors:
Sociology OVRs
[Describe and generalize
about sociology OVRs. Suggest best, also OVR Sociology.
Other Academic OVRs
[Generalize about other social
science OVRs here, see OVR Ant/Eco/Geo, OVR His/Pol/Psy, and OVR
SocialScience
Social Stratification OVRs
[Illustrate integration of video
sites into given course, OVR Social
Stratification]
Summary and Conclusions
Summary of Findings
Research Implications
- Expanding
Knowledge: OVR proliferation, coupled with greater video curation, represent
significant steps toward improving access to sociological knowledge. Along with
students, interested publics outside school settings can readily engage with
sociology ideas through such resources. Life-long learning can also be facilitated
through OVRs.
- Insights into Others' Social Worlds... cultures and people of other societies, subcultures within ones own... breaks down classroom walls... exposes student to other realities...
- Greater Understanding of One's Own World:...
- Diverse Perspectives: OVRs can help instructors integrate a wider range of approaches to sociological topics. Learning experiences can
therefore be enriched by greater exposure to alternative empirical realities
and theoretical applications.
- Changing
Pedagogy: OVRs can promote shifts in teaching styles and methods.
Instructors might increasingly incorporate video content into their courses,
adopting flipped classroom models or blended learning approaches. Students
taking online courses may especially benefit from diversity of content and
presentation afforded through OVRs.
- Monitoring Quality: Given the low barriers to OVR creation and distribution, ensuring
information quality becomes even more crucial. The evaluative component of
curation is particularly valuable in helping instructors select resources.
Nevertheless, assessment of OVR quality can also become relevant assignments for
building critical-review skills among students at all levels.
- Multisensory Learning: OVR growth aligns with research on teaching with video, which finds
that combining visual and auditory information can enhance comprehension and
retention of complex concepts.
- Accessibility
and Inclusion: OVRs can make sociological concepts more accessible to diverse
learners, including those with different learning styles or disabilities.
- Interdisciplinary
Connections: The growth of OVRs and OVR curation can encourage instructors and students to integrate content from related
fields, given easy access to relevant OVRs from other social sciences. Disciplinary silos that...
- Evolving
Content Creation: OVR development might inspire more instructors and students
to acquire video-creation competencies, potentially leading to greater academic and public engagement, as well as new forms of administratively
recognized academic production.
- Video Curation
Our research fits into broader
trends in digital learning, such as the rapid expansion of online instruction, the increasing use of video in education, and the growing emphasis on open-educational resources. It also aligns with
student demands for more flexible, personalized learning approaches.
SOCIOLOGY
People: Andrist, Chepp, Dean, Jessie Daniels, Elwood Carlson, Beverly Yuen Thompson, Akello Stone, Sam Richards, Chris Livesey...
ANTHROPOLOGY
People: Alan Macfarlane Abayaba's, Michael Wesch, Robert Lemelson, (see also Miller&CohenMiller 2019)
ECONOMICS
People: Dirk Mateer, Jadrian Wooten, John Popola, Russell Roberts, Robert Reich (see also Miller&CohenMiller 2019)
GEOGRAPHY
HISTORY
POLITICAL SCIENCE
PSYCHOLOGY
odds and ends
In sum, by implementing a combination of strategies--leveraging search engines and YouTube, utilizing online curation resources, and adopting RSS feeds--instructors can create an effective system for finding quality videos.
ADDs
A practical way to approach video curation is in terms of levels of curational inclusiveness. Curation of sociology teaching-film has largely taken the route of the lowest level: the video, the clip, the documentary. the movie—either as single entities (see such and such) or as multiple videos on the same or similar topics (see so and so). However, the latter are not multiple pieces of content from the same creator or distributor. The second level moves higher in organizational abstraction by virtue of addressing the collections in which single videos are distributed—the OVR. Within this context, curators can indicate all sorts of relevant qualitative and quantitative dimensions and changes. A relevant intermediary level of organization between first and second levels is the playlist—a feature that YouTube has institutionalized within OVRs that provides greater organizational coherence, usually by topic or theme, within the video channel.
Possible analysis of film resources. It includes selecting and organizing materials in a coherent manner in order to inform others about them, and in this sense, instructors play somewhat of a curatorial role in aligning videos for classes. However, curation may also entail more involved efforts, including synopsis, synthesis, and recommendation. Video curation is a process undertaken by a third party who mediates between a piece of video content, or a collection of content, and a potential audience of viewers, enumerating strengths and weaknesses of such content.
A central task in developing a practical pedagogy is therefore to propose systematic strategies to bring meaning, order, and appropriate use to this rapidly expanding, undifferentiated mass. In our opinion, at least three questions warrant current attention: how can online video be (1) addressed in a mechanical sense; (2) conceptualized relative to sociological content; and (3) applied for purposes of teaching and learning?
The first question, although beyond the purview of the immediate paper, relates to building skills in resource acquisition and management, and speaks to the fact that online video is highly accessible, portable, and transformable. Mechanical proficiency begins with recognition that such video can be configured within a larger Internet environment, which can then multiply its teaching and learning potential. One promising schema in this regard comes from the online-learning literature and treats video as the subject within the context of an inclusive multimedia generating and processing system (see Miller, 2011). The procurement, curation, and employment of video are thus seen as being enhanced through systematic adoption of various cloud applications—including RSS feeds, social bookmarking services, converters and editors, and content distribution technologies—which will help transform instructors into efficient users, and possibly also active producers of multimedia content.
Curation of
Sociology-Related Video
Video curation involves a
variety of functional tasks related to the display and description of film
resources. It certainly relates to selecting and organizing a body of materials
in a coherent manner for purposes of exposing them to an audience. But
curation is typically understood to entail more involved efforts, including summarization,
analysis, and evaluation. We believe curation is particularly valuable when it
demonstrates the direct application of how a video or set of videos can promote
teaching and/or learning.
Curating Online Video
Repositories
Video curation involves a variety of
functional tasks related to the display and description of film resources. It
certainly includes selecting and organizing such materials in a coherent manner
in order to inform others about them. But curation also is commonly taken to
entail more involved efforts, including summarization, evaluation, and
recommendation. We believe, curation of education-related videos is at its best
when curators describe how they can be applied to teaching and learning.
[Need to address automated
video curation.]
**Ultimately, sociology
instructors who employ video in their classes are indeed themselves video
curators ... (Rademacher 2021).
Middle-man (intermediary)
between content (material, resources, video) and the audience.
(Sarah Urist Green https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMZVUtUhNwo).
Curators mediate between content and audience...
role of intermediary - J
Johansson, 2019.
on YT content, use hits
and likes --also take selected quotes from comments. comments helpful also in
writing summary and assessment via paraphrase and selective quotes.
As found on the Internet,
video curation at its simplest level is evident where a series of video
channels are identified as the 10, 20, or 50 "top" or
"best" video websites or channels are listed, often without
specification of criteria...
range and types of video
curation: found, orig, remix...
types of video curation
(use curation sites as examples of types)
1.
videographic-criticism
McIntosh / Brutlag etc
2. analysis /
application / assessment / recommendation
TSC / PS...
3. OVR of found
video - perhaps categorized by playlist...
listing of found video --
a la Racism Review
4. OVR of original
video (shortcutsTV, Chris Livesey))
levels of curation
description and analysis. depth: listing to videographic criticism
also importantly--unit of
observation:
1. piece of
content
2. single
OVR
3. multiple
OVRs
We believe curation is particularly valuable when it demonstrates the direct application of how a video or set of videos can promote teaching and learning goals.
In this paper, we largely engage in descriptive curation by locating, organizing, and displaying OVRs, and we also perform limited evaluation by recommending certain sites. Hypertext links to sociology OVRs and their most recently uploaded videos are made available on this RSS page: https://www.protopage.com/millercohenmiller#OVR_SOCIOLOGY. Discussion is then directed to a limited subset that appear to be particularly serviceable as instructor resources or are otherwise remarkable. Given that understanding human behavior transcends disciplinary boundaries, we also identify OVRs from related social sciences that appear to have potential for employment in sociology courses (see https://www.protopage.com/millercohenmiller#OVR_Ant__Eco___Geo__, https://www.protopage.com/millercohenmiller#OVR_His___Pol___Psy and https://www.protopage.com/millercohenmiller#OVR_Social_Science). The final stage involves focusing on OVRs more precisely for purposes of application within discipline subfields. To illustrate, we aggregate both academic and nonacademic OVRs that might assist in teaching courses on the topic of social stratification (https://www.protopage.com/millercohenmiller#Social_Stratification).