This three-hour workshop is for researchers and heritage professionals who work with audiovisual (AV) materials. Participants will be introduced to AVAnnotate, an open-source application and a workflow for building digital exhibits and editions with annotated AV. Designed by Dr. Tanya Clement, Brumfield Labs, and Performant Solutions, AVAnnotate is built using minimal computing principles (Clement et. al 2022): it is free and easy-to-use and leverages publicly-available resources such as GitHub and IIIF (International Interoperable Image Framework), making it well-suited for researchers, archivists, and librarians interested in increasing accessibility, discovery, and scholarship with AV archival collections.

Scholars, students, and the public have created AVAnnotate projects to provide context for under-used and culturally sensitive historical audio and film recordings. The workshop leader will teach by introducing IIIF for AV and showcasing example AVAnnotate projects such as a bilingual edition of recordings from Radio Venceremos – a popular, clandestine radio station from the Salvadoran Civil War (1981-1992) period – and an exhibit from the Gloria Anzaldúa collection at the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at the University of Texas at Austin; a classroom project from the Stella Adler film collection at UT’s Harry Ransom Center; newly discovered recordings from a 1953 Harvard Summer School Conference including Ralph Ellison amongst other literary luminaries; oral histories from the Fortunoff Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University; and peer-reviewed, scholarly publications for AV scholarship created by AVAnnotate partners. These projects are significant case studies that demonstrate AVAnnotate approaches to developing interventions into practices around creating AV access and spark conversation about the changing nature of open and participatory humanities scholarship. 

Tanya Clement is the Director of the Humanities Institute and the Robert Adger Law and Thos. H. Law Centennial Endowed Professor in Humanities in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Virginia (2000) and a PhD in English from the University of Maryland (2009). She studies the dynamic interplay of digital information systems and scholarly research in literary study by considering how the data, algorithms, software, platforms, and networks that comprise digital information systems are co-constructed with the services, practices, policies, and theories that govern literary scholarship, including and especially literary archives. She is the lead investigator of the HiPSTAS (High-Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship) project, which has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Mellon Foundation. Her current HiPSTAS project is AVAnnotate, a platform for scholars and teachers to create digital editions and exhibits with audio and video. Her book on archival sound collections: Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives was published by MIT Press in 2024.