In February 2005, three former employees of Paypal created YouTube. The first video was available on the site on April 23, 2005. According to Google, YouTube now has over a billion viewers a day worldwide. In a relatively short time, digital video has become a significant source of not only entertainment but of information on the internet.

But sites like YouTube are primarily designed for entertainment and from my perspective lack some of the rigor I would expect for academic work. I am interested in discussing digital video scholarship, the use of digital video for the classroom, research and publication. For the last several years, I have been part of the Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive (www.eviada.org; media at media.eviada.org) which has been working with ethnographers to take their field videos, digitize them, segment and annotate them, and make these videos and annotations available on the web. As part of this process, these videos and annotations are also peer-reviewed and the annotations are copy-edited. One of the goals of the EVIADA web site is to provide not only rich, deep content but also the context of each video segment.

How can we take a medium like video and make it more than just accessible but also provide metadata, rich content, insight and academic rigor? What does it mean to peer-review such content? How should it be distrubuted? Who and what kinds of access should be given to this material? What about intellectual property? What about copyright?

How do we make video part of the classroom? part of research? part of publication?

My work at EVIADA and at the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (www.iub.edu/~idah) at Indiana University has given me a chance to grapple with some of these questions but I have not yet found answers to all of them. Well, ok. I might have answers to some. But I think the importance of video and moving images in general to 21st century culture will only increase and we should find ways to incorporate this into the digital arts and humanities.

For those interested, I can demo several tools we have developed at EVIADA and IDAH to help with the project, but these tools will be the start of the discussions rather the end.