AVAnnotate: Creating Scholarly Editions and Exhibits with IIIF and AV Archives

Tanya Clement, the University of Texas at Austin (USA)

Increased concern over media degradation and obsolescence combined with the decreasing cost of digital storage has led libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) to digitize audiovisual (AV) materials for improved access and long-term preservation. Yet, improving preservation and access must go beyond digitization. While they are sometimes the only record of an event or an aural, visual, or performance tradition, AV digital artifacts remain underused and understudied. IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) is one standardized solution that LAMs have adopted to give users the ability to perform basic humanities methods including annotating, comparing, discovering, illustrating, referring, representing, and sampling images. In 2020, IIIF extended the IIIF API to accommodate rendering AV in a web browser. In response to the need for a workflow that supports IIIF manifest creation, collaborative editing, flexible modes of presentation, and permissions control, we developed the AVAnnotate project. AVAnnotate facilitates sharing annotations on AV archives through a sustainable workflow that leverages IIIF and simplifies the production of online AV projects that provide commentary and context around under-used and culturally sensitive AV collections. Existing projects include curricula for recorded interviews with jailed student protestors during the Civil Rights movement, a bilingual edition of Radio Venceremos programs, a documentary of events at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, as well as oral histories from the Syilx Okanagan Peoples. The AVAnnotate project builds on IIIF to address gaps in increasing engagement with archival AV and providing a solution for standardized annotation collaboration and presentation.

Tanya E. Clement is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, an affiliate faculty in the School of Information, and Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her areas of research are modernist, textual, sound, and infrastructure studies as these concerns impact academic research, research libraries, and the creation of research tools and resources in Digital Humanities (DH). She leads High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS) for the development and interrogation of socio-technical infrastructures to increase access and scholarship with audiovisual cultural heritage collections. AVAnnotate, a HiPSTAS project, is currently being funded by a Mellon foundation grant. Her current book project is Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives, out with MIT Press in August 2024.