Introducing Ethnographic Video Online

A new resource just added to the Penn Libraries homepage, Ethnographic Video Online, provides access to a collection of over 1,000 films for the study of study of human culture and behavior, covering every region of the world, and featuring the work of many of the most influential documentary filmmakers of the 20th century. EVO Iicludes interviews, previously unreleased raw footage, field notes, study guides, and more. Thematic areas such as language and culture, kinesthetics, body language, food and foraging, cooking, economic systems, social stratification and status, caste systems and slavery, male and female roles, kinship and families, political organization, conflict and conflict resolution, religion and magic, music and the arts, and sex, gender, and family roles can all be studied cross-culturally.

Database features include:

• uniquely powerful browse and search capabilities enabled by Alexander Street's Semantic Indexing™
• multiple points of access—browses, searches, thumbnail images, transcripts — allowing you to find your point of interest in hundreds of hours of video within seconds
• synchronized, searchable transcripts
• video clip-making tools
• annotated playlists—you can make, annotate, and share playlists for course or individual use, and you can include links to materials or resources outside of the collection to make this your one-stop resource
• high quality, licensed, in-copyright material plus newsreel and other valuable footage
• the ability to create synchronized annotations and multi-media presentations
• an embeddable video player and playlist for use on a class Web site, library home page, or an electronic syllabus—lets you drive usage and deliver content to users where and when they need it without instructions or countless screens and clicks
• streaming, quickly accessible online video at 400 and 800 kbps with no delays and no special equipment (just Flash and a browser)

C-SPAN Video Library

Last week C-SPAN announced the completion of its the C-SPAN Video Library, a freely available Internet resource featuring every C-SPAN program aired since 1987, totaling over 160,000 hours. The Archives records all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Programs are extensively indexed making the database of C-SPAN programming an unparalleled chronological resource. Programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and location. The congressional sessions and committee hearings are indexed by person with full-text. The video collection can be searched through the online Video Library.

These archives cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations. Though C-Span was established in 1979, recordings from the early years are spotty. But according to a recent New York Times article, C-SPAN has about 10,000 hours of tapes from before 1987 and plans to reformat them for the Web are already in motion.

Needless to say, this is an awesome historical resource and on top of that, the site is advertisement free.

Global Media Monitoring Project's Who Makes the News? Preliminary Report

While the 2010 Global Media Monitoring Project's global, regional and national reports won't be published until September, 2010, a Preliminary Findings report has just been issued. GMMP is a project of The World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) which maps whether and how media representations of women and men have changed since 2005, when they first started systematic tracking.

A bit about GMMP from the website:

What is the GMMP?
The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) is the largest and longest longitudinal research and advocacy project on gender in the world's news media. It is unique in involving participants ranging from grassroots community organizations to university students and researchers to media practitioners, all of whom participate on a voluntary basis. The GMMP has two phases. The first is a research phase in which volunteer media monitors all over the world collect data on selected indicators of gender in their local news media, following specified guidelines. The second is the research findings' application phase which combines advocacy for gender-responsive media policies, capacity-building for gender-responsive media practice and gender-aware citizens' media literacy.

When does it take place?
Three GMMPs have taken place so far, the first in 1995, the second in 2000 and the third in 2005. The fourth global media research day is set for early November, 2009 when media monitors all the over the world will participate once again in a Media Monitoring Day - a one day massive, global effort to collect data on selected indicators of gender in their local news media. The follow-up data application phase (Phase 2) begins thereafter until 2014. What has the GMMP achieved so far? GMMP research from 1995, 2000, and 2005 shows consistently significant gender imbalances in news media content, news-making context and practice. Women are dramatically under-represented in the news, their voices silenced and contributions negated through stereotyping and invisibilisation. A comparison of the results from the three GMMPs in 1995, 2000 and 2005 revealed that change in the gender dimensions of news media has been small and slow across the 15-year period. As newsmakers, women are under-represented in professional categories. As authorities and experts, women barely feature in news stories. While there are a few excellent examples of exemplary gender-balanced and gender-sensitive journalism, overall there is a glaring deficit in the news media globally, with half of the world’s population barely present.

Will GMMP 2009/2010 make a difference?
The data generated by the monitoring project will provide gender and communication activists with a tool to lobby for more gender-sensitive media and communication policies in their national and regional contexts. The timing of the media monitoring for November means the results will be published in time for key
global processes scheduled for 2010, including the Beijing +15 review and the Millennium Development Goals Review Summit.

Arab Media Outlook

The Dubai Press club has just released its third Arab Media Outlook edition, Arab Media Outlook 2009-2013: Inspiring Local Content. AMO is a media development initiative of the Dubai Press Club; others includes the Arab Media Forum and the Arab Journalism Award. The 199-page Report assesses the region's media landscape, aiming to" build a knowlege-base on the media for the media for the benefit of industry stakeholders, policy makers, media scholars, students and the general public."

The report this year is far more exhaustive in its scope and reach than the previous editions and is backed for the first time, by extensive market research in four significant media markets in the region, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon on shifting media consumption habits. We have expanded the coverage of the report to include 15 Arab countries, namely, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, the UAE and the Yemen.

The last edition of the report came out soon after the onset of the global financial crisis, leaving out little scope for incorporating a detailed analysis of its impact on the media industry. We have tried to more than compensate for that in the present edition, providing a much more focused assessment of the media industry against the backdrop of the financial meltdown. The impact of the crisis, needless to say, varies from country to country, depending on the extent to which each market is exposed to global markets. The country-wise assessment given in the report takes into
account the specificities of each market covered.
--Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News

March CommQuote

A lyric from Mark Knopfler off his latest "album" Get Lucky is our feature for this month's quote. The song expresses a simple longing for life as lived before the car and before television. Both are indirectly impugned by the speaker's nostalgia for other forms of leisure.

Before Gas And TV

Before gas and TV
Before people had cars
We'd sit round the fires
Pass around a guitar
Remembering songs
When my daddy was home
He'd play along
On the spoons and a comb

We'd go with the flow
When the weather was fine
Sometimes we'd go
Collecting scrap iron
Then we'd sit round the fires
Pass a bottle of wine
And the tales of the road
Since time out of mind

If heaven's like this
Well, that's okay with me
Where the living is fine
And living is free
If heaven's like this
Well, then here's where I'll be
On the edge of the field
On the edge of the world
Before gas and TV.

--Mark Knopfler (2009, Get Lucky)

ONandOnScreen

Just discovered an interesting site called ONandOnScreen.

"Here poems and videos meet their match: poems are written for videos, and videos are made and paired with poems. The poems may enhance the videos and the videos may glamorize the poems.

ONandOnScreen is a conversation between moving words and moving images, on and on."

The site does not feature video of poets reading poetry, but rather poems and videos "talking" to each other.

Edited by Thomas Devane (check out his Burning the Bear Suit with accompanying video), and published quarterly, ONandOnScreen is currently accepting submissions.