We recently got a trial to Ethnographic Video Online, which is a product from Alexander Street Press.
Content
- There are transcripts for each video. When you watch the video, you can have the transcript displayed next to it. As the video plays, portions of the transcripted are highlighted in yellow so you can see where you are.
- If you go to full screen mode, the videos look somewhat pixellated.
- The scope of the content seems broad (wide range of geographic locations and cultural groups represented).
Navigation
- Users must first register (create their own free account)
- There is lots of metadata for each film
- Advanced search lets you search by transcripts and subtitles; title and series; ethnographer; date; publisher; recording location; language; subjects; persons discussed; and cultural groups
- Browse by ethnographer, geographic location, cultural group, subjects, people, and content type
- If you are viewing a transcript, you can click on a sentence and navigate the video to that portion of the film (I love this feature)
- Each video is broken up into a series of clips so you can jump ahead to specific scenes
- You can make your own collection of clips from different movies
- You can make and save your own playlists.
Sharing and Linking
- There are embed codes for each video. When I tried to use one of those codes to embed a video in this blog post, I got an error message in my browser, “A script in this movie is causing Adobe Flash Player 10 to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script?”
- Each video has a stable URL; each clip within a video also has a stable URL (this isn’t the case with the videos from Films and Demand)
My Take
- The content is of really high quality and navigation to it is top-notch.
- I don’t know what the demand is for such a product, but I’m very impressed by the database overall.