0.14 The evia project: many challenges, some solutions  (Page 5/9)

In closing, and by way of comparison, consider the Practice as Research in Music Online website described in Annex 4. This “cumulative research archive,” developed by the Institute of Musical Research in London, presents “full-length and excerpted rehearsals, workshops, performances, and demonstrations of various kinds” (234-5). The textual component is limited, however, to “a description and abstract giving a summary of the item's content and an insight into its contribution to current research” (234-5). Without wishing to dismiss the PRIMO initiative altogether, I cannot help but regard it as a missed, or at least unrealized, opportunity for presenting the kind of documentation, analysis, and self-reflection referred to above. In a nutshell, what one gets in PRIMO is footage plus a few paragraphs; but what could be produced thanks to the EVIA annotation methodology is a rich resource along the lines of EVIA’s own annotated video content, though used to different ends. Such a development would be highly significant to the body of creative practitioners whose working methods to date have been at odds with what funders like the AHRC require, and who, as a result, have not had the opportunity to share in an intellectually convincing and technically feasible manner the kinds of insights that underlie their artistic endeavors and the research insights that either feed into or arise out of them.

Annex 1:summary of evia report

Some of the key points in Alan Burdette’s paper are summarized here for ease of reference.

Since its inception in 2001, EVIA’s primary mission has been “to preserve ethnographic field video created by scholars as part of their research,” and its secondary mission has been “to make those materials available in conjunction with rich, descriptive annotations,” thereby creating “a unique resource for scholars, instructors, and students.” This has required the building of tools and infrastructure to preserve and document recordings and “to make them part of the scholarly enterprise through a unique form of peer-reviewed online publication.” By its very nature the work has been highly collaborative. To date, seven collections have been made available online, comprising seventy hours of annotated video, with a further 1,200 hours “in various stages of completion.” All of this has required “significant investments” in funding and effort.

Collection development has occurred in two main ways:

1. through an application process;
2. through collaboration with other projects or individuals.

Development has also resulted from projects collaborating with EVIA “for preservation and access services”; exceptionally, collections in this category “are not peer reviewed,” although some portions may be “more highly annotated and then peer-reviewed.”

The use of peer review for video annotations is one of EVIA’s distinctive features and is intended to create both “a stand-alone publication” and “a resource that can be used in conjunction with other print or online materials.” The annotation process involves the following stages: