Writing with Media — Reconfigurable Digital Archives in the Humanities

The use of digital archives and material collections promises to significantly enhance the way we teach subjects in the humanities. Especially in culture and literary studies, access to a wide array of original source documents can provide students with an unprecedented source for their studies, allowing them to analyze documents within a larger cultural, historical, social, and political context. Whereas most digital archives in the humanities focus primarily on the access to materials, MetaMedia encourages students to work with these materials creatively. MIT's MetaMedia combines an open standards-based digital repository framework with highly flexible annotation, collaboration, sharing, reconfiguration, and upload features. To date, MetaMedia contains mini-archives ranging from Arab Oral Epic, Modern American Dance, and Early American Comics to cross-cultural foreign language projects and the Declarations of Independence. The presentation will discuss MetaMedia's pedagogical concepts, implementation of open standards, its software architecture, and use in the classroom.

MetaMedia, developed in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, provides students and faculty with a flexible online environment to create, annotate and share media-rich documents for the teaching and learning of core humanistic subjects. Through collections of media documents pertinent to a specific topic or field, MetaMedia adds the dimension of active archive use and thus considerably extends the notion of multimedia archives. Based on open standards, the MetaMedia framework ensures interoperability with a wide range of current media resources such as text, image, audio, video documents, as well as future media formats. MetaMedia offers a flexible software framework with which users can annotate, share, reconfigure, and contribute media-rich documents. These documents can be organized in the form of highly flexible collections, providing the basis for new modes of classroom discussion, on-line collaboration, multimedia presentation and essay writing, as well as other educational and scholarly activities appropriate to the humanities. These collections combine photographs, text documents, recorded sounds, and moving images to provide a meaningful repository for teaching topics central to the Humanities curriculum. Materials collected and annotated by scholars retain their own, pristine identity, while teachers are able to draw on these resources in classroom instruction and distance education settings; students are able to draw on the same resources as they research, create, and collaborate on multi-media essays or presentations. The result is improved skill at communicating effectively in today's increasingly global world of education and business. Specific learning outcomes include enhanced ability to:

Think across traditional boundaries between disciplines
See connections across multiple disciplines
Build and share knowledge through collaboration
Look at problems from unfamiliar perspectives
Express their ideas more vividly
Collaborate more effectively
Understand not just what we know, but how we know it
These outcomes, in turn, more generally improve students' abilities to:
Think critically
Communicate effectively
Develop a deeper understanding of complex problems
Build learner and instructor communities
Architecture:

MetaMedia relies on a markup-oriented strategy based on standard formats used throughout the Humanities Computing community. Storing content and associated metadata in Dublin Core, Text Encoding Initiative, SCORM, and MPEG formats presents a number of advantages over older designs based on static web pages or ad-hoc data files.

Storing markup in standard formats will allow MetaMedia to separate media content cleanly and simply from its presentation in a given user interface.
Separating content and presentation extends each project's potential lifetime, as markup can be output in XML and migrated to new platforms as old ones become obsolete.
Supporting open markup standards allows related groups in Humanities Computing to exchange media and annotations, thus fostering collaboration within and across academic institutions.
Storing content in rich markup formats from the start allows projects to grow into more sophisticated functionality without starting from scratch. For these and other reasons, digital archiving projects have adopted SGML- and XML-based markup as the de-facto standard.
However, MetaMedia expands on traditional practice in two regions: collaboration and media annotation. The MetaMedia framework implements a permissions and authentication management system that allows users to add and share content, thus fostering constructivist models of learning and research rather than those based on simple knowledge diffusion. Also, it can make multi-tier annotations to media files using established markup formats and transition to more fine-grained annotations as multimedia markup formats mature.

Tools currently under development include the annotation of parts of large-scale images, multi-level annotation of video and audio files, and a comprehensive multimedia essay tool.

More information can be found at: http://metamedia.mit.edu