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.