The Berkman Tuesday lunchtime speaker was Glorianna Davenport from the MIT Media Lab. She wants to get more video and images on the Web. “I love to have a camera in my hands,” she says.

In 1986, she put 6 hours of video about New Orleans on disk. 250 scenes. 50 major characters. This required creating a random access editing system as well as thinking through hypertext issues. Now she’s been making a diary of her family for the past twelve years. And she’s trying to find ways to annotate video (she thinks of video, etc., as “collections” that tend to be quite large and on a particular topic), a daunting challenge because there are so many types of information in them.

She’s currently talking with a Cambridge school that wants to video just about everything, in part to see if they can find new ways of evaluating students. E.g., how about portfolios instead of tests? Q: What about this being the same as surveillance? A: It’s being discussed. (Students are involved in the discussion.)

She’s interested in “continuity” not in Hollywood’s sense of making sure the cigarette is dangling from the same side of the mouth from shot to shot but as a cognitive binding. Google is fabulous, she says, but not fabulous at showing ideas within their stories and “fabric.”

She has a vision of a society in which everyone provides the stories and information from which histories are written or gathered. We get that somewhat with blogs, she says, but it’s generally only text. Her vision is open access — “The Internet has clearly done a wonderful job but it has quite a ways to go” — that gets over the digital divide.

The discussion centers for a while around what having so many points of view does to our ability to have a shared history.

Would a flickr-like measurement of “interestingness” help people pull together pieces? Glorianna thinks not because interests are often highly individual and idiosyncratic.

“It’ll be a long long time, if ever, that a machine wil lbe able to look at the bits and tell what it’s about.”

Q: How about the legal issues? Now, the person who takes the video has legal rights over it.

A: We’re using Creative Commons. But, she says, it’s thorny. [Tags: berkman GloriannaDavenport multimedia blogs]

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