1.

Description of the project and its significance

Provide a one-page abstract written for a nonspecialist audience, clearly
explaining the project’s importance to the humanities, its principal activities, and
its expected results.

It is not just the increased use of multimedia materials, especially video, in the
classroom and on the web, that is important but also the use by many scholars of
original materials, fieldwork, interviews, and original productions created by both
scholars and students. To make use of these materials on the web, many teachers
are using already existing tools like YouTube or Flickr to upload their videos for
access by students and other scholars. These tools provide limited capabilities for
scholarship, providing limited annotation, limited tagging, no context for the video
segment and no opportunity to easily link with other content.

Background on the Annotator’s Workbench

The Annotator’s Workbench is a digital video segmenation and annotation
application that is part of a suite of applications developed for the Ethnographic
Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive (EVIADA) Project, a multi-year,
multi-million dollar program funded by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. This project was a collaboration of Indiana University and the
University of Michigan. The suite of applications was developed at Indiana
University and is open source.

The Annotator’s Workbench (AWB) is designed to allow an ethnomusicologist,

anthropologist, folklorist or other ethnographer to take digital copies of their field
videos and to segment those digital videos and then annotate each of the video
segments. This annotation is then indexed and the video segments are searchable
and can be played back on the Internet by the public.

By extending this tool we hope to provide a platform that will assist not only
ethnographers in the field but also teachers wanting to use original video content in
the classroom and large scale archives needing to annotate collections of video.

2. Table of contents

List all parts of the application and, beginning with the narrative, number all
pages consecutively.
3. Narrative

Limit the narrative to twenty single-spaced pages. All pages should have one-inch
margins and the font size should be no smaller than eleven point. Use appendices
to provide supplementary material.
Individuals with a variety of professional backgrounds will read these applications
and advise NEH on their merits. Project narratives should therefore be written
with a minimum of technical jargon.
Keep the application review criteria (see below) in mind when writing the
narrative, which consists of the following sections:
o Significance
Explain the issue or problem to be addressed and how the humanities
would benefit from the proposed solutions. Describe how the project would
advance humanities research, education, or public programming. Consider
how your project relates to other work in the field and how it would
contribute to solving the research problem. Relevant reference sources
should be listed in a bibliographical appendix.
o Background of applicant
Explain the applicant institution’s capabilities for conducting the project,
including its possession of the necessary technical infrastructure and
scientific facilities. Describe the institution’s experience in areas related to
the project.
o History, scope, and duration
Provide a concise history of the project, including information about any
preliminary research or planning. If a project will take more than three
years to complete, describe the scope and duration of the entire project as
well as the specific accomplishments or products intended for the grant
period for which funding is requested.
If the project has been previously supported by NEH, indicate what has
been accomplished in the current or past grant period and the degree to
which the project has met its established goals. List any publications, in
print or electronic form, already produced. When appropriate, indicate
print runs, sales, and royalties relating to these publications. In the case of
online projects, include the Internet address, and provide statistics of use
and other relevant information.
o Methodology and standards
Explain and justify the procedures and standards that will be used to carry
out the project. If the project’s goals require departing from accepted
standards and procedures, discuss whether the results would be compatible
with other resources that follow existing standards. Describe how the
project will test the potential applicability of any innovative techniques and
procedures that the project is likely to develop. In addition, provide a plan
for evaluating the results of the project.
For projects developing procedures, best practices, or national standards,
describe how advisers representing the relevant professions will guide the
project and how any products will reflect the collective knowledge and
judgment of experts in the field.
Projects developing new software are encouraged to make the software
free in every sense of the term, including the use, copying, distribution, and
modification of the software. Applicants are also encouraged to make any
humanities content created during the project free and accessible to the
public.
Discuss any intellectual property or privacy issues that might affect the
availability of the project’s results—for example, copyrighted materials,
proprietary technologies, or licensed software. Permissions in matters
 concerning intellectual property must be obtained, and any pertinent
documentation must be provided in an appendix.
Applicants requesting complete or partial funding for the development,
acquisition, preservation, or enhancement of geospatial data, products, or
services must conduct a due diligence search on the Geospatial One-Stop
(GOS) Portal (www.geodata.gov) to discover whether their needed
geospatial-related data, products, or services already exist. If not, the
proposed geospatial data, products, or services must be produced in
compliance with applicable proposed guidance posted at (www.fgdc.gov).
o Work plan
Describe the work plan in detail, including a schedule indicating what will
be accomplished during each stage of the project.
o Staff
Identify the project’s staff, including outside consultants. Describe the staff
members’ duties and their qualifications for those duties. Indicate the
amount of time that the principal members of the project’s staff will devote
to the project. All people directly involved in the conduct of the project,
whether paid for by NEH or by cost sharing, must be named in the budget,
along with their anticipated commitments of time. In an appendix provide
two-page résumés for major project staff and all consultants.
If the project has an advisory board, list the names and affiliations of the
board’s members and explain the board’s function.
o Dissemination
Describe the plans to disseminate the project results through various media
(printed articles or books, presentations at meetings, electronic media, or
some combination of these). In the case of digital products, explain the
provisions made for their long-term maintenance and interoperability with
other resources. Applicants are encouraged to make freely available to the
public any software, source code, or other products created as a result of
the project, preferably through a publicly accessible online repository such
as SourceForge.
4. Budget

Using the instructions (4-page PDF) and the budget template (3-page PDF) ,
complete the budget spreadsheet (MS Excel format) or a format of your own that
includes all the required information. While all items should be justified by the
narrative, further explanation may be included in brief budget notes.
For any outsourced work, third-party contractor costs should be included in the
budget category “Services.” Attach a complete itemization of these costs to the
budget form. If there is more than one contractor, each one must be listed on the
budget form and the costs itemized separately.
To the maximum extent practical, all procurement contracts must be made
through an open and free competition. They are to be awarded to the bidder or
offeror whose bid or offer is most advantageous, considering price, quality and
other factors. Applicants must justify procurement contracts in excess of $100,000
that are not awarded by competitive bids or offers.
 Permanent equipment may be purchased for a project if an analysis demonstrates
that purchasing is more economical and practical than leasing. Permanent
equipment is defined as nonexpendable personal property costing $5,000 or more
and having a useful life of more than one year.
Consistent with the Buy American Act (41 U.S.C. 10a-c and Public Law 105-277),
grantees and subrecipients who purchase equipment and products with grant
funds should purchase only American-made equipment and products.
5. Appendices

Use appendices to provide

a brief bibliography of relevant sources;
brief résumés (no longer than two pages) for staff with major responsibilities for
the project’s implementation; and
letters of support. Such letters should address the project’s significance and be
written by experts in the project’s subject area, proposed methodology, or
technology. Authors of letters of support will not participate further in the NEH
review process.
As relevant, include the following as well:
representative samples of the final or anticipated form of the work;
job descriptions for any additional staff who will be hired specifically to work on
the project;
brief résumés (no longer than two pages) for project consultants; and
letters of commitment from consultants and participants from cooperating
institutions.
6. History of grants

If the project has received previous support from any federal or nonfederal sources,
including NEH, list on one page the sources, dates, and amounts of these funds. If
the project has a long history of support, the sources and contributions may be
grouped and summarized.
7. Project participants, consultants, and advisers

On a separate page, list in alphabetical order, surnames first, all project

participants, consultants, members of the project’s advisory board (if there is one),
and authors of letters of support; include the institutional affiliations of all of these
individuals. The list is used to ensure that prospective reviewers have no conflict of
interest with the projects that they will evaluate.

Redesigning the Annotator’s Workbench

Using the Annotator’s Workbench in the Field
From the beginning of the project, there has been much discussion on using the
Annotator’s Workbench in the field as a way to organize and annotate field videos as
they are being created, opening up the opportunity to share the video with those
being recorded and to get their input on names, translations and other specifics.
Since so much video is now born digital, this seems like a logical step.

However, in our discussions with ethnographers who were creating digital video in
the field, it became obvious that not only would a tool that could do video
segmentation and annotation in the field be valuable but a tool to assist in the
organization of all the digital video files being produced may be of equal value.

Other Projects Using the Annotator’s Workbench

In addition to the EVIADA project, several other projects, Central American and
Mexican Video Archive (CAMVA) funded by a TICFIA grant for the Department of
Education, Kelly Direct, an online Masters program at the Kelley School of Business,
and the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM) a
linguistics study of the Yiddish language at Indiana University have used the AWB as
a way to segment and annotate video for access through the web. Unlike the EVIADA
project where the annotator was the creator of the videos and thus had only to deal
with the 6 – 10 video files that made up his or her contribution, these projects often
have to deal with hundreds if not thousands of video files and the annotator is not
necessarily the creator of the video. Because of this, a way to easily organize and
work with these video files is very important.

In addition, projects of this nature are often looking to create and maintain the web
site that provides access to the material with as little trouble as possible.
Consequently, a solution that helps organize content and provides a simple way to
get that content on the web would be very valuable.

Proposed Improvements to the Annotator’s Workbench

The first major improvement to the AWB would be the creation of a new front end.
Now, when the AWB is loaded, you are presented with the tool’s desktop and you
must create a new video project or open a previously saved project. To
accommodate the needs of both the users in the field and other projects that need to
deal with large quantities of video, we propose adding a new front end that would
work similarly to photo organization software, such as Apple’s iPhoto or Google’s
Picasa. Using the AWB with this new front end would open a screen with a list of
video files in some chosen directory. You would be able to move from one directory
to another. Once you found the video file you wanted to work with, a double click on
the file would load it into AWB. If you had segmented and annotated the video
before, the AWB would load that into the AWB desktop. If not, then the AWB would
create a new project file for the video. If you selected multiple files in the front end,
then the AWB would either load all the project files (previous segmentation and
annotation) or create a new project that would contain all the video files selected on
a single timeline.

In addition since some of the projects would involve multiple video files, you would
see a side bar with a list of projects for the video files that are in the current
directory. By double clicking a project file, you would be able to load all the
segmentation and annotation for that project, whether it is a single video file or
multiple video files.

The second major feature would be the ability to generate a functioning web site
from a single project file or from multiple project files. This generated web site
would include the ability to search the content of the project file(s), return a result
set, select a video segment to playback. In addition you would be able to navigate
the entire collection by either a hierarchy display with links to segments or by an
interactive timeline that would allow you to navigate to a selected segment. (See the
EVIADA website, http://media.eviada.org for an example of both capabilities.)

To create the web site, we would consider using existing open source tools, such as
KORA, from the Matrix, Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online
at Michigan State University, or Omeka, from the Center for History and New Media
at George Mason University. Both these tools will generate web sites for archival
purposes and allow content to be added. In addition, both of these tools support the
use of plug-ins to extend the existing capabilities of the tool.

Additional New Features

Images could be incorporated into the project file in two ways. First, the image
would simultaneously display with some segment of the timeline. The annotator
would determine how long the image would display as the video is playing. Second,
the image would be available as more or less a slideshow in the project. The
annotator would layout a series of image files on the timeline and determine how
long each image would play.

Adding audio files to an existing project would require three different modes. First
mode: the audio replaces the audio on a given segment of video. Second mode: the
audio plays simultaneously with the video audio, giving the ability to do a voice over
on the video. Finally, the audio would be inserted into the time track and would be
additional material, not replacing or supplementing any video tracks.

As with images, text would be added either at specific points on the timeline and
given a display duration or would be in addition to multimedia segments. Another
way that text might be added would be to associate a text file with a given video
segment, similar to the way the descriptive metadata is associated with segment
now except that this text would possibly be more extensive and the annotator would
be able to do more extensive formatting.

Improved transcription and translation. Associate line by line transcriptions with a

given part of the timeline.

Cut and paste video segments on the timeline including metadata.

Merge multiple project files into one project file.