"Show Your Work"

Moving North Carolina

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Video Annotation, Citations, & Showing Your Work

"It's been so long, I really have no idea why I listed the TV episodes as I did--probably was just following whatever the standard format for endnotes at the time was. If I come up with any more interesting insights on this question, will let you know." –email exchange with Susan Faludi [1]
"We struggle less to remember facts than we do to remember where and how to find them -- and how to assess their validity." –Anne Burdick, et al., in Digital_Humanities [2]
"Because most journalists won’t go to law school and study the law thoroughly, the best thing that they can do is act as ethically and as purely as possible because that counts in the law—your motive. It doesn’t solve a legal issue, but it has a lot to do with whether you’ll prevail in a legal issue." –Gregg Leslie, Legal Defense Director for Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press [3]

Speaking truths with film...

The idea for using video annotation tools as one manner of facilitating the citation of original, archival sources in documentary films, television programs, video, advertising and other media creations, originates from a few zeitgeist moments that happened earlier in 2016. My intent is to quickly detail those events and how they influenced my turn, as a scholar in the humanities and archival practices, to a tool. My methodological survey of what's out there, as of this writing, will concentrate exclusively on open source and cheap-to-free products, with varying degrees of incline to their respective learning curves. The objective, at this halfway point in the overall project is two fold: to discover how a video annotation tool can make it easier to cite primary archival born-digital, video, film, and photographic sources in published moving image works; and what impediments stand in the way of their use, literally, conceptually, and habitually? In lieu of simply analyzing what I perceive as a gap in ethical and collegial practice, I embraced practice in order to understand more fully how time-consuming and/or tedious such an endeavor as citing sources might be for creative types such as filmmakers, and for other makers remixing and reusing works for various purposes. To that end, I have personally annotated with citations a short clip from the documentary Moving North Carolina, made for UNC-TV by Michael Sheehan (full disclosure, I was an archival researcher on the project), using one of the tools I surveyed. Additionally, I will describe what other related projects I am exploring for a video annotation tool.

I am compelled to state up front that I am a full-fledged advocate of the doctrine of fair use [4] and am not calling for more restrictive copyright laws or anything of that nature. I have tackled this subject elsewhere [5] and will continue to fight for striking a balance between privacy and copyright concerns and creators' rights. This project stems more from a question, especially within a political climate we find ourselves after the 2016 presidential election where "truth" is always in quotation marks, about evidence (be it damned). As the opening quote suggests, we may "struggle less to remember facts," but increasingly technology, and our adaption to it, has bolstered discoverability, and "how to assess their validity." I am hopeful that a video annotation tool might serve both purposes.

Out of courtesy and now common practice, filmmakers and television show producers will include in the end credits a list of footage providers. However, uncovering the source of a given clip or photo or newspaper headline and attributing that to the list of names scrolling quickly by, is a rather bumpy road, which often leads to dead ends for a researcher, especially unfamiliar with historically problematic audiovisual sources and their formatting and preservation and access issues. There are no laws or rules exempting moving image works from incorporating such a thing as citing sources in a work writ large on a movie screen as each new source pops up, or as an ancillary feature alongside/below as one watches it in an online environment. There are, however, creative and production constraints I'll address below. Conversely, I found little out to suggest that citing primary sources might be best practices. More than just tracking down the validity of a particular assertion, I propose that filmmakers, especially documentarians, have an ethical responsibility to cite their sources. As documentarian and scholar Bill Nichols suggests in Speaking Truths with Film, "A code of documentary ethics needs to focus on protecting the well-being of two groups (1) film subjects […] and (2) actual viewers or audience members." [6] In a litigious age, showing all of one's cards might be scary at first, but it takes a few pioneers to make the way.

Citations are rich resources in many ways. Citations are the roadmap from inception to creation to acquisition by a repository or collector to archival processor/cataloguer to researcher to filmmaker to post-production artist to distribution house to distribution venue to audience member. They also play a collegial role between generations of makers and scholars, makers and seekers of truth. I hope focusing on moving image primary documents as cultural artifacts worthy of citation will assist somehow bringing them into the fold of broader scholarship, by disciplines outside of media studies. As Tanya E. Clement asserts in regard to audio sources even digital humanities scholars lack a full understanding of what "deep" or "close" listening entails because many come from discreet fields that "lack the models that proliferate work with text images" and "struggle to imagine how to describe access to sound and the research or teaching with sound we might hope to engage." [7] Simply switch out "sound" for "moving images" and the problems, I suggest, are the same. Furthermore, I think there's something implicit in Clement's saying regarding audiovisual documents not being taken seriously, in academia, as evidence and not simply illustrative. I hope to tease that out a bit more in coming months. It's unlikely I will have time to unpack these issues with any complexity at this mid-point of the project, but as my research progresses I intend by spring to develop a well conceived argument after some interviews with filmmakers, footage providers, and library staff. Stay tuned to this space for me insights.

Background...

On to the zeitgeist… In March of this year I presented at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies annual conference on the representation of feminist writers on 1980s television talk shows. During the research phase I was taken aback by the utter lack of proper (and by proper I mean a citation that leads me to what specific programming a writer was viewing in an archive or TV station tape library) citations for television episodes or news programs viewed by writers and journalists analyzing the same during the 1980s/early '90s. What I wanted was the ability to backtrack, view the material, and make my own decision as to the potential relevancy to my work, instead of relying solely on their take. When compared with the meticulously cited newspaper and magazine articles, I was puzzled why authors didn’t do the same for what I could only imagine was deemed ephemeral daytime television, and thus not worthy of citing. Looking for an answer, I wrote to Susan Faludi, whose book Backlash among others I culled for sources, asking why her television sources were so scantily cited as opposed to print sources. She kindly replied, but seemed puzzled by the question, and assumed I was asking about the citation style of her publisher. Just a month prior, I had interviewed filmmaker Connie Field for another presentation on her film, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, and we talked a lot about her extensive use of archival footage and her great respect for archives and archival research. I had written a review of the film some years prior upon then upcoming release of a new print of Rosie that the Academy Film Archive had restored; and part of my review specifically noted the extant DVDs' end credits were nearly illegible thus obscuring names of archives and repositories. I thought it was a shame that a film so reliant on archival footage and photographs was all but completely rendered useless that information for other researchers. (This issue was remedied by preservation work and a newly struck print a few years ago.)

In May I read comments on a Facebook thread started by a rather well known collector/vendor/filmmaker and instructor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Rick Prelinger in which he rightly questions why the archival footage he provides to others goes unacknowledged but for his company's name in the end credits. He wrote:
"I find it amazing that documentary filmmakers are accorded such great authority by audiences, reviewers and scholars when they are not obligated to cite their sources (especially egregious when archival materials are used) or the authority for their statements. If I wrote an academic book or a peer-reviewed paper without citing sources I would be toast. And even if I wrote a thoughtful piece for a newspaper or popular periodical, their fact-checkers would be all over me asking me where I got this or that fact. I don't really know what this says about documentary film, other than to confirm that it is generally a privileged form of fiction." [8]
In response, various filmmakers and journalists chimed in either affirming puzzlement or churning up counter arguments claiming all facts are subjective anyway, how one might define documentary, what best practices are, and so on. This conversation solidified in my mind, at least from an experimental angle, that there could be a few ways to annotate a moving image production with citations for primary source material, and thus also open up a discussion about archival labor, collegiality, etc. Through that conversation, I became acquainted with filmmaker Penny Lane who shared with me her experimental technique implemented for her new documentary film NUTS! --- online footnotes, [9] and a journalist and professor at the University of Southern California, Lisa Leeman, with whom I have exchanged ideas. A perfect storm of ideas.

State of my methodologies...

Methodologies and examples to emulate while developing my project have been scarce. Starting with the basic idea of citing sources, I of course turned to guidelines and best practices for journalists and nonfiction television program producers, what we might consider the vanguard of day-to-day practice of vetting (one would hope) and keeping track of both testimonies and archival sources. For the sake of brevity, I want to point out a few poignant standards and rules I found that may point to a hesitancy on the part of makers to cite specific sources in a place where viewers can see it, and thus why I'm finding it tough to find examples! One: even for the list of source providers, producers are limited to precise lengths, in minutes, for end credits. For instance, in terms of rules, on the BBC's Channel 4 a thirty-minute show can include at maximum of 25 seconds of credits, a seventy-minute, factual program can run with 30 seconds. This sort of exactness is an industry norm. For feature-length filmmakers, again, they can list out every source provider, but we have no idea who supplied what. Two: there are also guidelines for readying your work for fact-checking. For producers at shows like PBS's Frontline they are asked to do the following:
"In matters of fairness there is one specific requirement: all producers must have a fact-checking procedure at the completion of the program in which every line of narration and synch and every picture is checked for the accuracy of any factual assertion...Be prepared to cite a source or sources for the fact asserted. Please note that assertion of facts by experts may be accepted without checking, but producers should review those assertions if any credible question arises about their accuracy. If an expert’s assertion calls into question the character or competency of another person or entity or is otherwise possibly defamatory, then the assertion may not be accepted without verification. All factual assertions by nonexpert interviewees must be checked." [10]
Mostly the emphasis in situations like these is on the need for fairness in reporting over any perceived necessity to cite all evidence for review.

Onto what concrete projects I can look to for inspiration. I actually found two filmmakers who have created footnotes for their feature-length films, one for a documentary, and one for fiction film based on historical events. Penny Lane, who I mention above, created "Notes on NUTS!" a searchable website populated with her annotated footnotes. Her whip-smart and fun attribution of "truthiness" to archival resources amounts to an exercise in full disclosure of facts, as she knows them, and according to where they fall on her self-defined scale. This approach requires funding (either a grant and/or a budget line of some sort), a web designer if need be, and at least some forethought, which I know was the case for Lane. I will return to forethought later on in this paper. In conversation with me, and elsewhere, Lane sums up her reasoning: "I thought if I could provide my viewers with footnotes, maybe I could make interesting headway in a significant ethical debate around truth and manipulation in documentary." [11] Second, to my delight I recently discovered that filmmaker Gary Ross has also created a very well researched and documented list of annotated footnotes—with some honest-to-god citations—for his film Free State of Jones. [12] I've approached him for an interview, but he's not returned my message by the date of this writing. I would apply the same limitations here as far as budgetary and time concerns, and, I surmise, a concentrated eye on track primary sources and evidence for full disclosure from inception of the project.

The third model I have looked to for ideas is a tool. The Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) allows for "word-level search capability and a time-correlated transcript or indexed interview" capable of "connecting the textual search term to the corresponding moment in the recorded interview online." [13] I am smitten with the way Duke University Libraries has employed it to synchronize shot lists with digitized films from the H. Lee Waters Film Collection. [14] However, OHMS has a steep learning curve, and requires a fair amount of IT backing (perhaps why it seems to have more institutional implementation), although you can request a personal account, and its code is open source. It also utilizes the most common technique for timecode-based synchronization to image, which is pretty much industry standard.

As I pursue my line of inquiry about tools, I stay cognizant of Johanna Drucker's assertion that any tool is associated with a graphical rhetoric and epistemological viewpoint stemming from its disciplinary origins. [15] I have surveyed a number of open source and proprietary video annotation software apps, and a list of ones I've eliminated can be found in the footnotes. [16] The tools I've chosen to demonstrate for this project long-term are the video annotation function that comes with online publishing platform Scalar [17], an open source marketing plugin called H5P [18], and a tool built as an addition to the UNC Digital Innovation Lab-born suite of tools called Prospect. [19] I will be preparing my personal Wordpress site to accommodate the H5P plugin over the holidays, and I am still awaiting a the completion of the Prospect addition. As mentioned above, thus far I have completely annotated one excerpt from a documentary that features a multitude of archival primary sources using Scalar. (Fig. 1) I cannot speak to each of their respective pros and cons, in relationship to each other, until the spring semester when I've had time to test the usability of all three. 

Future ideas and next steps...

To return to the topic of foresight and the anticipated user, a filmmaker or any content provider, will want to keep good records of their sources along the way. I worked with a filmmaker who was relatively diligent about tracking precisely where source materials came from, and the job of reconstituting those citations for annotation was still time-consuming. The end must justify the means when it comes to data management, and that can be a hard sell to creative types. It also requires time and human resources (read interns or other paid staff or the maker themselves) and a line item to the budget--much in the same way as subtitles or graphics. Moreover, filmmakers and other content producers, whether working independently or for a larger entity, need to recoup their financial investment by screening their work publicly, streaming online after the initial run, and so on. This eye to making a living can't be overlooked, and producing an ancillary version with citations may seem at first to interrupt that process. Perhaps an annotated version behind a pay wall? Along this vein of simplicity, I'm looking at software or applications that are mainly free, open source, and ideally with a quick learning curve. I am hopeful an annotation tool will make the task easier. Ultimately, like so many innovations that have eventually become industry standards, it's a matter of perceived need and audience reception.

Lastly, my aim to promote and facilitate a more collegial, ethical, “show your work" mentality serves a longer-term encouragement for more engagement between scholars/students and or amateur historians and archival and unpublished audiovisual materials. With that in mind, I am now in conversation with with UNC's Wilson Library Special Collections and Southern Folklife Collection and a local footage provider, A/V Geeks, about creating each of them a "highlights reel." This use of a video annotation tool is primarily for promoting what material repositories or collectors have licensed or given away, thus creating a montage of clips (in a more polished, click and play display in Scalar, and/or video recording using H5P) they can show to clients or donors, and students. The hope here is that by foregrounding citations and footnotes, we foster a love of research, impart how much labor is involved on both sides of the library reference counter, and encourage inquiry during those moments when we sit back and enjoy a movie.

Citations

[1] Author of Backlash. Susan Faludi, e-mail message to author, February 20, 2016.
[2] Burdick, Anne, Drucker, Johanna, and Lunenfeld, Peter, "Generative Humanities as the New Core," Digital_Humanities, (Cambridge, US: The MIT Press, 2012), 23.
[3] Aufderheide, Patricia, et al. Dangerous Documentaries: Reducing Risk When Telling Truth to Power, Center for Media & Social Impact, February 2015, http://archive.cmsimpact.org/sites/default/files/documents/dangerousdocs-feb2015.pdf
[4] For more on the Doctrine of Fair Use and how it relates to filmmakers, see "Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use," Center for Media and Social Impact, accessed on December 4, 2016, http://cmsimpact.org/code/documentary-filmmakers-statement-of-best-practices-in-fair-use/.
[5] Dollman, Melissa. Cue the Women (2014), https://vimeo.com/120827699.
[6] Nichols, Bill. Speaking Truths with Film : Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary. (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016), 157.
[7] Clement, Tanya E. "When Texts of Study Are Audio Files: Digital Tools for Sound Studies in Digital Humanities," A New Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 24.[8] Rick Prelinger's Facebook page, accessed October 9, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/rick.prelinger/posts/1716773811943307.
[9] "Notes on NUTS!," Penny Lane, accessed October 9, 2016, http://notes.nutsthefilm.com/.
[10] "Journalistic Guidelines [for Frontline]," PBS.org, accessed December 6, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/about-us/journalistic-guidelines/.
[11] Lane, Penny. "Should Documentary Films Have Footnotes?," Filmmaker Magazine, accessed December 6, 2016 http://filmmakermagazine.com/99730-should-documentary-films-have-footnotes/.
[12] "Free State of Jones," http://freestateofjones.info/.
[13] OHMS, University of Kentucky Libraries, accessed October 9, 2016, http://www.oralhistoryonline.org/.
[14] "Chapel Hill (N.C.), 1941 (Reel 1)," Duke University Libraries, accessed October 9, 2016, http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hleewaters_rl10075bcam0003010/.
[15] Drucker, Johanna. "Graphical Approaches to the Digital Humanities," A New Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 242.
[16] Here is a quick list of those I've considered my abridged notes as to why rejected them at this time. [17] "Scalar 2 Is Here," The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, accessed on December 6, 2016, http://scalar.usc.edu/.[18] "Interactive Video," H5P.org, accessed on December 6, 2106, https://h5p.org/interactive-video.
[19] "Prospect," Digital Innovation Lab, accessed on December 6, 2016, http://digitalinnovation.unc.edu/category/prospect/.

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