Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Video annotation tools vs video analysis tools

During the presentation by Dr. Laurent Filliettaz, excerpts of videos and transcripts from the videos were provided as examples of the data gathering and analysis of workplace based interactions between apprentice and trainer. From this, I could see that it would be important to have a way to bring transcripts and the video together in order to save time and multiple screenings. Therefore I had a look in the library for articles or books on video annotation.


An article by Rich & Hannatin (2009) in the Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 21 (2) caught my attention. This article reported on a project ‘ scaffolding video self-analysis discrepancies between preservice teachers’ perceived and actual instructional decision’ used a customised video analysis tool (VAT) to annotate the videos using a ‘commenting’ process to add speech bubbles to the videos.

The previous review of video analysis software shows that many of the tools are used in the sports areas and can be expensive when all we need to do in our project is to annotate the videos.

I then began an investigation into video annotation tools, as opposed to video analysis tools. nVivo provides for the facility to run a video and to have a transcript entry along with a blank column (for comments). I did the usual google search for ‘video annotation tool’ and came up with the following.

Anvil is a free for educational and research purposes and requires a email to the developers to obtain a copy. Seems to work very much like Audacity. Not sure if we will need all the bells and whistles but will email to obtain a copy to do a comparison with nVivo.

A simple video annotation tool might be the way to go if all we need to do is to put simple tags on the video.

Project pad provides a comprehensive tool with more information provided at open cast projects


So will need to follow up with trying things out on nVivo. As future iterations of the multimodal analysis project at CPIT will include collaboration with other polytechnics, I will also explore the use of Anvil and perhaps Transana, which has appeared on several research papers which require video data analysis (does cost small amount).

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