This guest post is written by Jasmijn Van Gorp. She is the project leader of QuaMeRDES. Currently, she is a postdoc at the Centre for Television in Transition, Utrecht University. She has been a visiting scholar at the Russian Film Institute in Moscow and at the Comparative Media Studies program of MIT, Cambridge MA.
Through quantitative content analysis, media researchers describe the content of media in a systematic and quantitative way to discern patterns in representations or trends over well-defined time periods. The new CLARIN-NL project QuaMeRDES is developing a tool to analyse and compare the content of Dutch television programmes and newspapers. QuaMeRDES is a collaborative project of the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, Utrecht University’s Centre for Television in Transition and Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam (UvA).
QuaMeRDES is a follow-up project of the NWO-CATCH project BRIDGE. BRIDGE involves a collaboration between the same three institutes, and develops and tests tools that explore audiovisual archives. The tools developed by BRIDGE are MeRDES (Media Researchers’ Data Exploration Suite) and CoMeRDA (Contextualising Media Researchers’ Data).
MeRDES enables comparative analysis between two individual items from the television catalogue of the Sound & Vision archive, through visualisations such as word clouds and timelines. CoMeRDA links different collections, a.o. photographs, the Sound & Vision wiki, newspapers and the television catalogue, and facilitates simultaneous search across these collections. Their ‘daughter’-tool, QuaMeRDES, combines characteristics of both, but is most similar to MeRDES.
Scholars such as media researchers, historians, and digital humanists will be able to use the QuaMeRDES-demonstrator to explore, analyse and compare the content of Dutch television programmes and newspaper articles. Further, a new feature will enrich the iMMix catalogue of Sound & Vision (i.e. the catalogue with metadata descriptions) with subtitle files. These subtitles enable users to search for and analyse the dialogues and voice-overs of television programmes. At an analytical level, subtitles can be understood as discourses, similar to those of articles in newspapers. One could investigate, for instance, how comedians in a comedy show on television talk about the topic of migration. In addition, these discourses can be compared with journalists’ discourses on migration in newspapers. At the same time, the newspapers can provide a political and social context for the way in which migration is discussed in the comedy show.
Since the use case for QuaMeRDES is the representation of migrants on Dutch television, one of the challenges in the development of the tool is mining geographical terms: how can the term ‘migrant’ be traced in the archive? If a researcher, for example, searches for ‘Russian migrants in the Netherlands’, s/he needs to be able to exclude programmes about people in Russia, filmed in Russia, in order to retrieve the programmes that are solely about people from Russia in the Netherlands. Besides an overview of the programme descriptions at a glance, it requires –among others- an advanced query editor, with AND-, OR-, and NOT-functions. The QuaMeRDES-demonstrator will provide these functions, as well as geographic visualisations.
A first prototype of the tool will be discussed in a usability study in September; the second prototype will be tested in a longitudinal study in December 2013. QuaMeRDES will be launched mid-2014 and will be part of the Sound & Vision environment.
More Information
- The prototype version of MeRDES can be found here
- MeRDES is currently developed into the tool AVResearcher, which will be part of the Sound & Vision environment
- For enquiries about the QuaMeRDES-project: j.vangorp@uu.nl
- Related: Search Interface to Aid Media Scholars Blog post by Katarzyna Ciszek on 17 September 2012
- Image remixed from NASA's Various Rocket Installations at Rocket Laboratory and the MeRDES interface.