Archive for the ‘Video’ Category
Depression Memories on Video
March 17th, 2009
The New York Times has announced an oral history project called The New Hard Times. Readers are invited to interview friends or family members who lived through the Great Depression, and have them share their memories and offer their advice for surviving hard times.
A good example is this video conversation between 96-year-old business school professor at New York University and one of his students : Professor Ernest Kurnow.
One woman who lived through the Depression has become something of an Internet celebrity sharing her recipes and memories on YouTube. 93-year-old grandmother Clara Cannucciari is the star of a series of videos called Depression Cooking with Clara, made by her grandson, filmmaker Chris Cannucciari. Clara’s old-fashioned, simple cooking and engaging manner have won her many fans.
These videos are also good examples for anyone interested in doing an oral history project for their family or their community. Many people freeze up in a recorded interview, but are more comfortable and natural when they are demonstrating a favorite activity, and the results can be more interesting for the viewer as well.
Depression Cooking with Clara, Episode 4 – Peppers and Eggs
- Great Depression Cooking with Clara — Clara’s website and blog
- DepressionCooking — Clara’s YouTube channel
- Skaneateles grandmother cooks up memories on YouTube — by Article by Sean Kirst in the Syracuse Post-Standard about Clara’s life and new fame
Posted in 
Information in Video
February 19th, 2009
For my What’s New with What’s New presentation for the Boston Regional Library System:
- JoVE : Journal of Visualized Experiments — “A peer reviewed, free access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format.”
- Design for Dreaming — A young woman gets swept out of her bed and off to the 1956 General Motors Motorama. This film from the Internet Archive is one of a large collection of promotional, educational and sponsored short films that are excellent sources for studying history, social psychology, communications and popular culture.
- Truveo — Go way beyond YouTube with this video search engine. [Truveo Example: Truveo : Search Engine for Video]
- Living Room Candidate — Campaign commercials from 1952-2008 from the Museum of the Moving Image
- Weird Bug in My Backyard !? Help me Identify it! — People post reference questions to YouTube
JoVE : Journal of Visualized Experiments
December 31st, 2008
JoVE describes itself as “a peer reviewed, free access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format.” Founded in 2007 by Moshe Pritsker, JoVE is a collection high-quality, professionally recorded videos from the labs of top universities and research institutions, showing cutting-edge research in the life sciences. The emphasis here is on demonstrating experimental techniques which are often difficult to understand or replicate based on written description in journals. JoVE’s videos are included in PubMed, and they recently began adding videos in the areas of medicine and psychology.
JoVE is one of a growing number of sites sharing high-quality science videos aimed at everyone from elementary school students to graduate students, professional scientists and the general public.
Science Video Sites
Links on Science Videos
- Top Ten Amazing Biology Videos — Brief article posted by Aaron Rowe in Wired Science, November 23, 2008
- A Video Community for Biologists — Brief article posted by Aaron Rowe in Wired Science, May 17, 2007
- Biology Videos Now Available on PubMed — Brief article posted by Aaron Rowe in Wired Science, August 18, 2008
- Meet JoVE: The YouTube Of Scientific Journals — Brief article by Zeina Siam, The Tech, MIT
- Out in the Open: Some Scientists Sharing Results — Article by Carolyn Y. Johnson in the Boston Globe, August 21, 2008, on JoVE and the open science movement.
Animoto Adds Text
November 13th, 2008
Animoto is a service that makes it simple to turn a group of photographs into a music video. You can upload your pictures from your computer or pull them in from another photo site like Flickr, choose some music from Animoto’s collection or upload your own, and then let Animoto create your video. It takes about ten minutes for your video to be ready, and if you don’t like the results, you can run it through again and get a remix. It’s free to make 30 second videos, and you can make longer ones for $3.00 each or $30.00 a year.
Animoto just added a new feature which will be great for libraries — the ability to superimpose text across your pictures. This makes it easy to take a group of pictures from the Children’s Room and have words like “Come to story hour” and “Get help with homework” float across the screen. It’s really easy to use, and the video you make can be uploaded to YouTube or posted to your blog or website.
Here’s a quick example, just a remix of one of my first test videos I made several months ago, remixed with a few words added. It’s really easy to make these, and just another way to show off your library pictures!
And you also might want to use this as a library program. Kids and teens (or anyone, actually) will also enjoy playing around with this their own photographs with Animoto.
Living Room Candidate
October 8th, 2008
Living Room Candidate — If you’ve had enough of the 2008 election, how about looking to the past? The Living Room Candidate website is a beautifully-designed online exhibit from the Museum of the Moving Image, showcasing presidential campaign commercials from 1952 to 2008. You can explore by year and read a short article about each candidate’s television strategy, or browse by type of commercial (biographical, fear, real people, etc.) or by issue (corruption, taxes, war, etc.)
But the amazing thing here is that you don’t just read about the commercials, you can watch them online and draw your own conclusions about how fair, accurate and effective they were. These primary sources are invaluable for media studies and political history.
Some of these are quite entertaining, too. I love the contrast between two 1952 commercials, Eisenhower’s cartoon “Ike for President” and Stevenson’s torchy “I Love the Gov.” commercial.
Read the rest of this entry »
Truveo : Search Engine for Video
July 13th, 2008
I love YouTube, and have found some amazing things on there, but there’s whole world of video online beyond what you’ll ever find on YouTube. I used to use Google’s Video Search , but was never particularly impressed with the results. I knew there had to be something better…
And then I found Truveo, a video search engine that makes it easy to find all kinds of video content from around the web. A Truveo search on Puffins, for example, finds videos from professional media organizations like National Geographic, the BBC and NECN, as well as social sites like YouTube and Vimeo — the best of both worlds.
Truveo is a great reference resource, a way to find relevant video on all kinds of topics. For example, someone interested in information about the journalist Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, might be very interested in the Malcolm Gladwell videos found in a quick Truveo search, which includes videos from sources as diverse as Business Week and Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, as well as podcasts from the New York and Pop!Tech, and speeches from Fora.tv.
It’s not just the quality of the search results that make Truveo so useful, it’s also the way those results are displayed in a concise, grid format, with lots of options for sorting and refining the search results. There are options along the top of every page that let you sort results by Most Relevant, Most Recent, Most Viewed This Month, Most Viewed of All Time, etc. If you scroll down below the main search results grid, you’ll find various featured content. This varies depending on your search. For example, for a search on origami, you’ll find featured channels (content providers) like MetaCafe and Revver, and a list of other channels, like HowCast. A search on the name of jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden also has facets for channels, but also tags like “ukelele” and “armstrong.”
Every set of search results also has two buttons, Feed and Snag. Feed is an RSS/XML feed of your search results, handy for putting into your feed reader, personalized Google page, etc. Snag is lets you create a nice blog widget of search results, which you can add to any blog or webpage. Here’s my snag widget for the Malcolm Gladwell search:
I highly recommend Truveo — I can’t imagine how I lived without it!
