Video Skills for Interdisciplinary Research
Created by Catherine Howell (University of Cambridge) on November 22, 2006
Use of digital video is exploding in UK higher education, both as a tool for teaching but also as a topic for research -- and in the arts and humanities, as well as the sciences. New meta-search tools like PureVideo are making video content newly accessible to researchers and institutions. Organisations like JISC, AHDS and the British Universities' Film and Video Council are helping to set up open-access video archives for education. There's a whole constellation of factors at work (technological developments, affordability, licensing agreements, etc.), jointly conspiring to make digital video an emergent key research tool.
What particularly interests me in all this is that film and video, as research tools but also as research subjects in their own right, have broken free of the boundaries of disciplines like Media Studies, Design, and Journalism. In the humanities, digital video is now of significant interest to historians, political scientists, performing arts specialists, literary scholars, architects--in fact, the whole scholarly battalion. In Cambridge, high demand has led to establishment of a new graduate degree programme in Screen Media, and a cluster of associated research seminars. At a graduate training seminar I gave recently, I couldn't keep up with the video-related questions fired at me by the students.
Using digital video seems to enable interdisciplinarity. This is intriguing, especially in the context of a research-intensive university with well-established disciplinary methods and microcultures. And it demands that staff and students acquire new skills -- including "social" skills like e-safety and copyright, as well as technical skills. Who within research institutions is recognised as having this kind of expertise, and who is best placed to deliver "whole package" training? Is there a growing skills gap between older and younger staff, or between staff and students? What new forms of collaboration might video use enable, or require?
What particularly interests me in all this is that film and video, as research tools but also as research subjects in their own right, have broken free of the boundaries of disciplines like Media Studies, Design, and Journalism. In the humanities, digital video is now of significant interest to historians, political scientists, performing arts specialists, literary scholars, architects--in fact, the whole scholarly battalion. In Cambridge, high demand has led to establishment of a new graduate degree programme in Screen Media, and a cluster of associated research seminars. At a graduate training seminar I gave recently, I couldn't keep up with the video-related questions fired at me by the students.
Using digital video seems to enable interdisciplinarity. This is intriguing, especially in the context of a research-intensive university with well-established disciplinary methods and microcultures. And it demands that staff and students acquire new skills -- including "social" skills like e-safety and copyright, as well as technical skills. Who within research institutions is recognised as having this kind of expertise, and who is best placed to deliver "whole package" training? Is there a growing skills gap between older and younger staff, or between staff and students? What new forms of collaboration might video use enable, or require?
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