Using Advene to Bridge the Gap Between Users and Ontologies in Movie Annotation

Abstract

Feature movies and documentaries analysis has always relied on available access tools and possibilities: movie theaters required memorizing whole sequences, home video (VHS, DVD) brought new possibilities for analysis. Digital video tools now provide additional capabilities, such as video annotation, which is sometimes used in research contexts, from simple synchronized note-taking to more structured approaches. The AdA project of the Cinepoietics team of Freie Universität de Berlin aims at investigating the audiovisual rhetorics of affect in audiovisual media on the financial crisis. The analyses are framed by theoretical assumptions on the process of filmviewing, and one of the goals of the project is to study in what measure a systematic approach based on semantic annotations of the audiovisual corpus can bring a new light to the reflexions. Such an approach requires appropriate tooling for humanities researchers. We will describe in this contribution how the Advene video annotation platform has been extended and used to produce and use semantic annotations, and to validate the underlying ontology, accompanying the humanities researcher practices in the AdA project.