How to effectively and efficiently search for content from large video archives such as BBC TV programmes is a significant challenge. Search is typically done via keyword queries using pre-defined metadata such as titles, tags and viewer's notes. However, it is difficult to use keywords to search for specific moments in a video where a particular speaker talks about a specific topic at a particular location. Most videos have little or no metadata about content in the video, and automatic metadata extraction is not yet sufficiently reliable. Furthermore, metadata may change over time and cannot cover all content. Therefore, search by keyword is not a desirable approach for a comprehensive and long-lasting video search solution. Video search by examples is a desirable alternative as it allows search for content by one or more examples of the interested content without having to specify interest in keyword. However, video search by examples is notoriously challenging, and its performance is still poor. To improve search performance, multiple modalities should be considered - image, sound, voice and text, as each modality provides a separate search cue so multiple cues should identify more relevant content. This is multimodal video search by examples (MVSE). This is an emerging area of research, and the current state of the art is far from desirable so there is a long way to go. There is no commercial service for MVSE. This proposal has been co-created with BBC R&D through the BBC Data Science Partnership via a number of online meetings and one face to face meeting involving all partners. The proposal has been informed by recent unpublished ethnographic research on how current BBC staff (producers, journalists, archivists) search for media content. It was found that they were very interested in knowledge retrieval from archives or other sources but they required richer metadata and cataloguing of non-verbal data. In this proposal we will study efficient, effective, scalable and robust MVSE where video archives are large, historical and dynamic; and the modalities are person (face or voice), context, and topic. The aim is to develop a framework for MVSE and validate it through the development of a prototype search tool. Such a search tool will be useful for organisations such as the BBC and British Library, who maintain large collections of video archives and want to provide a search tool for their own staff as well as for the public. It will also be useful for companies such as Youtube who host videos from the public and want to enable video search by examples. We will address key challenges in the development of an efficient, effective, scalable and robust MVSE solution, including video segmentation, content representation, hashing, ranking and fusion. This proposal is planned for three years, involving three institutions (Cambridge, Surrey, Ulster) and one partner (the BBC) who will contribute significant resources (estimated at £128.4k) to the project (see Letter of Support from the BBC).

This project will engage with the contributors to User Generated Content websites in order to understand better how they use such sites to develop their skills and knowledge. UGC sites offer a mix of opportunities to post your own work and receive comment from the community of users as well as post comments on the work of others. In some cases there are also opportunities to communicate with acknowledged experts. There is a lot of interest in this kind of activity, which is seen as a newly emerging cultural practice that has democratised media publishing. However, little research into UGC sites has yet been funded or published, so little is known about the range and depth of engagement. Early indications are that interaction around such content hosting sites might offer opportunities for contributors to learn more about creating media and develop their practical and critical skills. In order to explore this potential the BBC has developed BBC Blast, a UGC web service with a real world tour element. The resulting store of content, posts and established users provides an excellent research site to analyse the extent to which such communities of users do in fact collaborate to learn and develop their creative skills. \n\nIn order to explore the potential of sites such as Blast to support learning communities and inform BBC developments in this area University of Bristol and BBC staff have collaborated to develop the following research questions (which are further developed in the work programme):\n\nAbout users and use:\n\n- Who is posting user generated content (UGC) and what motivates them?\n- Can the dialogues that emerge within Blast actually support learning?\n- Do learning communities grow up around UGC sites like Blast / is there real interaction between users that informs and develops the work of those who post? \n\nAbout BBC Blast:\n- To what extent does the Blast offer, including Blast on Tour, meet its goals of engaging and inspiring creative learners?\n- How might the design (technical and editorial) be modified to maximise this impact?\n\nThis project would therefore seek to accomplish the following goals:\n\nAn analysis of existing interactions for evidence of learning dialogues. \nA review of the range of models of such dialogues that occur elsewhere. \nAn articulation of the ways in which the design and functionality of Blast could be developed to increase the opportunity and range of such learning dialogues.\nHistories of particular user development, tracking the journey from newbie to expert\nAn overview of the patterns of engagement with UGC sites to understand the motivations of those who post, those who see posting as an opportunity to learn and those who chose not to post. \n\nThroughout the project will be exploring a variety of ways to engage the creative, technical and editorial staff at the BBC in a dialogue about the research and its implications. We intend to use a blend of face to face and virtual strategies to maximise the range of opportuinties for knowledge exchange.\n\n

This project is designed to allow the investigation of how the BBC might use its archive holdings via the Open Archive. Specifically it will study how the BBC deals with its regional audiences and how regional rather than national news and historical agendas might be prioritised to provide these audiences with material that can be used to explore memories of significant events in their own lives. It will also study how archivists and broadcasters deal with ethical issues raised by sensitive or contentious material and explore ways in which these materials need to be contextualised for future use. \n\nThe study will be based on the major historical event of the National Miners' Strike (1984-5) and will focus specifically on how various categories of material, including news, documentary and dramatic reconstruction have represented this strike and how it might be used within communities directly affected by it and its long-term consequences. There is obviously still much sensitivity surrounding the strike and many people feel that their own perspectives have only been partially represented through news ands documentary records and find aspects of the original coverage\ndifficult to equate with their own experiences. As part of the study we will be producing a compilation of news, documentary and dramatic reconstruction materials to use with audiences drawn from mining and associated communities in South Yorkshire and conducting detailed questionnaires and focus groups based on their own memories and responses to this material. This material will then form the basis of the final report and the preparation of policy advice for the BBC. We will be asking participants their views on a range of issues.\n\nThrough this study we will be able to understand a number of issues and present, through a final report, our findings, conclusions and policy recommendations to the BBC and other interested stakeholders.\n\nThe project will be conducted by the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds and BBC Research Centre North- Information & Archives. It will take place over a nine month period ending with a final report and symposium. The project takes place in five phases outlined below:\n\n1. The joint appointment of two research assistants for a total period of three and six months respectively. \n\n2. The identification, selection and digitisation of news, documentary and drama footage from relevant BBC and Regional Film and Television Archives. This will result in a series of compilations of material to be used in restricted screening contexts and within focus groups. \n\n3. The design of focus group questionnaires and audience survey materials. \n\n4. The delivery of controlled focus groups within regional communities. \n\n5 The writing, editing and delivery of the research and future policy report by the Institute of Communications Studies which will then be passed to the steering committee for approval. \n

Cultures of fear can be spread, either deliberately or otherwise, by a wide range of agents including the media, government, science, the arts, industry and politics. The ease of which fear can be generated means that today's society remains inordinately fearful of improbable harms and dangers. A good deal of societal fear stems from mistrust of 'the Other': a term used to describe individuals or groups that are, quite simply, 'not like us'. In this project, we explicitly explore this notion of 'Othering' as it occurs in situations where 'the Other' are seen as "anomalous," "peculiar," or "deviant" and hence negatively perceived, stigmatised, excluded, marginalised and discriminated against. Recent high-profile examples of practices of Othering in the UK include the exclamation that "tens of thousands of eastern Europeans" would enter the UK when immigration restrictions were lifted at the beginning of 2014 resulting in, for instance, a "crime wave", and the "poverty-porn" portrayal on broadcast television of seemingly whole communities of "benefit claimants living off of taxpayers' earnings". Such practices can lead to a lack of tolerance, respect and inclusion, as well as actual fear, mistrust and marginalisation of whole communities; these effects have severe and well-known implications for local communities as well as for national social cohesion. There are significant unanswered questions regarding how acts of Othering translates into effects on real populations and in real contexts, and what role online digital media can have in propagating cultures of fear and mistrust. With online social media, no longer is fear delivered exclusively in a top down manner, (e.g. from government and the mainstream media). Instead it is now also delivered from the grassroots level and therefore insidiously present in the user-generated social data streams that we absorb from our encounters with the web, and, in particular, with platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Recent observations of social media discussions of the Channel 4 documentary Benefits Street have, for instance, highlighted the high levels of antipathy, anger and abuse directed at the community portrayed within the programme. Fear may also be unwittingly, yet pervasively, propagated by the plethora of emerging digital apps, data and services that promise to improve our lives; for instance, the release of open crime data is meant to increase confidence in our law enforcement agencies, yet its actual effect is to increase fear of crime and, yet again, stigmatise communities. The focus of this project are the cultures of fear that are propagated through online Othering and how this leads to subsequent mistrust of groups or communities. Our research will generate an understanding of how the deliberate design of online media services and platforms can influence and oppose cultures of fear and result in cultures of empathy that can actively, and strategically, reduce or eliminate mistrust and negative consequences of Othering. We will actively collaborate with stakeholders to co-design new digital services that facilitate wide-scale empathy with specifically chosen often-Othered groups. This will include active collaboration with broadcast media organisations to develop a range of interactive, digital online experiences delivered alongside traditional media. We will also undertake online ethnographies and data collection, where prior or existing activities have portrayed a group in ways that actively provoke Othering as evidenced through discourse on social and traditional media; in this instance we will design and deliver a set of digital services to counter this in a deliberate manner.

Digital storytelling is described for the public by the BBC on their dedicated web-site (www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales) in the following way;\n\n'Digital Stories are 'mini-movies' created and edited by people like you / using cameras, computers, scanners and their own photo-albums. Everyone has a story to tell and new technology means that anyone can create a story that can be shown on a web site like the one you see here. The idea is to show the richness of life in Wales through stories made by the people of Wales. It's you who decide what these stories are.'\n\nDigital stortytelling is a new creative form. It amalgamates new technology, filmmaking, photography, music, story and social purpose. These activities cut across boundaries in the arts, democratising the process of media making and establishing an anti-heroic position for the artist/storyteller. The concept that is being developed is one of an interactive and conversational media that represents digital stories as an extension of the quotidian storytelling of everyday life.\n\nThis project will develop new understandings of how digital storytelling has developed to this point and ways it could progress in future. The BBC Capture Wales project, and the community applications which have grown from it, will provide a focus for the work.\n\n\n