Paper Section: VIDEO Curation and AI notes on video curation

 

Video curation involves a variety of functional tasks related to the display and description of film resources. It certainly includes selecting and organizing materials in a coherent manner in order to inform others about them, and in this sense, instructors play a curatorial role in aligning videos for their classes. However, curation is typically understood to entail more involved efforts, including synopsis, synthesis, and recommendation. Video curation is taken to mean a process generally undertaken by third parties who mediate between video and target audiences of potential viewers, specifically enumerating strengths and weaknesses of such media content. 

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.

AI Notes:

VIDEO CURATION

Video curation is the systematic process of selecting, organizing, and presenting video content from various sources to create a meaningful collection for a specific audience or purpose. Let me break this down:

Core Definition:

Think of it like being a museum curator, but for videos. Just as a museum curator carefully chooses which artworks to display and how to arrange them, a video curator:

- Discovers and evaluates video content

- Selects the most valuable or relevant pieces

- Organizes them in a thoughtful way

- Provides context and connections between pieces

- Maintains and updates the collection over time

Common Forms:

- Creating themed playlists on platforms like YouTube

- Running a video-focused website or blog

- Managing a company's video content library

- Developing educational video collections

- Programming content for streaming services

- Assembling social media video feeds

What Makes it Different from Just Collecting:

- Purpose-driven selection based on defined criteria

- Adding value through organization and context

- Quality control and ongoing maintenance

- Focus on audience needs and experiences

- Strategic presentation and accessibility

Key Activities:

1. Discovery - Finding relevant content from various sources

2. Evaluation - Assessing quality and fit with collection goals

3. Selection - Choosing which content to include

4. Organization - Creating meaningful structure and flow

5. Contextualization - Adding descriptions, tags, and related information

6. Presentation - Making content accessible and engaging

7. Maintenance - Keeping the collection current and relevant

Would you like me to go deeper into any of these aspects of what video curation involves?

The contextualization function in video curation involves adding layers of meaning and relevance to help viewers better understand, find, and engage with the content. Here's a detailed breakdown:

Metadata Enhancement

- Creating detailed, searchable descriptions

- Adding accurate timestamps for key moments

- Tagging with relevant topics, themes, and categories

- Including technical specifications (length, format, language)

- Crediting creators and contributors

- Noting the creation date and version information

Narrative Context

- Explaining why the video is significant or valuable

- Providing historical or cultural background

- Highlighting connections to current events or trends

- Identifying the target audience and intended use

- Explaining complex concepts or terminology

- Noting any prerequisites or related content

Relational Context

- Creating connections between related videos

- Building thematic sequences or progressions

- Identifying prerequisite content

- Suggesting complementary materials

- Mapping relationships between topics

- Showing where content fits in larger collections

Educational Framework

- Identifying learning objectives

- Suggesting discussion questions

- Providing supplementary resources

- Noting difficulty level or expertise required

- Adding study guides or worksheets

- Including assessment opportunities

Content Warnings and Guidance

- Flagging sensitive content appropriately

- Noting age appropriateness

- Identifying potential triggers or concerns

- Providing viewer advisories

- Explaining any biases or perspectives

- Addressing quality or technical issues

Accessibility Context

- Adding closed captions or subtitles

- Providing transcripts

- Describing visual elements for screen readers

- Noting language options

- Including accommodation information

- Ensuring proper formatting for different devices

Sociological Imagination

Curating Online Video to Ignite the Sociological Imagination

Michael V. Miller & Anna S. CohenMiller

(work in progress, to be submitted to Teaching Sociology, early 2025)

 

Abstract

Sociology instructors wanting to employ video in their courses lack clear guidance about content already available on the Internet. We here introduce online video repositories--i.e., websites, blogs, and video channels that provide links directing users to relevant content from both within and outside the discipline. We also offer a corresponding digital tool to facilitate ongoing search and location of such content through the mechanical interrogation of repositories.

The Problem

Instructors can create their own videos and they can also leverage those made by others. While those that are self-produced allow customization to specific educational objectives, there are compelling reasons to use the work of others, including lack of time and video-production skills, as well as the massive amount of relevant film now online. Countless commercial websites constantly upload new content, and popular user-sharing platforms provide access to that made by professional and amateur creators alike. Applicable news stories, interviews, speeches, lectures, demonstrations, documentaries, and clips from movies and television shows, in addition to instructional programming, abound online. Indeed, instructors, who faced a paucity of film resources twenty years ago, are now confronted by virtually limitless bounty. Furthermore, improvements in Internet infrastructure and video coding have removed many technical barriers to video integration and have made streaming highly efficient for most users.

Despite the exponential growth of online video, finding good content yet remains a challenge. Such trouble has been commonly cited as a major barrier to their full instructional adoption (e.g., Kaufman and Mohan 2009, Marquis, Wojcik, Lin, and McKinnon 2020), and this has become even more pressing in light of the heightened interest in quality resources since the 2020 mass transition to remote teaching (Fyfield, Henderson, and Phillips 2021, Nguyen 2022). Those wanting to integrate video may well expend significant effort sifting through the welter of online content with only minimal returns. 

We suggest that the main impediment today is neither technology nor content, but is rather a matter of misplaced curation. Sociology as a discipline has simply invested insufficient effort in recognizing the productive output of video creators among its ranks, and likewise has ignored long-standing digital affordances such as RSS that could have pointed instructors to quality resources available on the Internet. Online video curation effectively began for sociology 15 years ago with the pioneering efforts of Andrist, Chepp, and Dean and their creation of The Sociological Cinema. Instructors today nonetheless are not likely to have a firm idea of the nature and range of video collections they can draw from for their classes, much less how they might find or stay abreast of such resources. To a great extent, this is because video curators in sociology, and in other disciplines for that matter, continue to curate content at the lowest level of empirical reality–individual videos.

Toward a New Curational Framework: Online Video Repositories

This 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 advance the productive employment of video in at least two basic ways. By being explicitly directed to quality collections, sociology instructors can better come to know those sites appropriate to their teaching interests. Widening curational scope from single videos to collections invites instructors to expand inspection to the corpus of videos located there. And, as instructors become familiar with creators, they may come as well to anticipate and even encourage future creator efforts. Interactions between the two could help build online creator-instructor networks (see Palmer and Schueths 2013), key to further motivating and sustaining video-creation 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 public attention. In this paper, we employ RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a digital application which can systematically link and organize websites, video channels, and blogs in clean window interface. RSS permits immediate video identification and access from a common web location. Moreover, the OVR landscape that we map through 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 creates, 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. Although many sites remain to be discovered with ongoing search efforts, we believe this sample is of sufficient size and diversity to allow for meaningful generalizations about the current state of sociology OVRs.

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 identify OVRs from related social sciences through RSS and provide commentary on those having significant 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 in serving courses on the topic of social stratification.