[Corpora-List] ACL Video Archive - summary of responses

[Reinhard Rapp]

Dear Colleagues,

With regard to our previous e-mail (see below) to 
this mailing list, Bonnie, Drago, Chris, and I would like 
to thank the following people for their responses and
followup e-mails:

Andreas Eisele
Hal Daume III
Erik Tjong Kim Sang
Jason Eisner
Tomaz Erjavec
Chris Callison Burch
Yorick Wilks
Alexandre Rafalovitch
Wouter Weerkamp

Let me try to give a summary.

Most feedback was on interesting CL related
videos to be found on the web. By now, the
relevant section in the video archive, namely
"Links to videos on the web", has been updated 
and the respective pointers have been included, see
www.aclweb.org/videoarchive

Hal mentioned that many of the recordings to 
be found at http://videolectures.net come from
the bi-annual machine learning summer schools,
and suggested that we should try to apply the same
approach to similar CL related meetings such as the 
JHU summer workshop, ESSLI, and the IRTG
summer school. This would indeed be highly
desirable, so we would appreciate any support
on this.

Jason and Chris brought to our attention that hundreds
of talks have been recorded at the Center for Language 
and Speech Processing of the Johns Hopkins University
over the past 15 years, some of them still on VHS
cassettes. This appears to be a real treasure, waiting
to be digged up.

Yorick mentioned that he will continue his series 
of interviews with the founders of computational
linguistics this summer with Martin Kay. The intention 
hereby is to honour outstanding scientists, and to 
preserve these important bits of the history of our 
field for those to come. Let me say that we are more 
than happy about this initiative, and about the motivation 
behind it.

Alexandre pointed us to several interesting websites
including PodCorps:
http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/podcorps/
They are trying to coordinate a network of volunteers
with the aim of recording as many public events
as possible, which may be very relevant to us.
(If anyone has experience with this, further comments 
would be welcome.)

Wouter was able to give us detailed technical information
on how to synchronize flash videos with pdf slides.
This is non trivial as the technology is new and as we 
are working under certain constraints. For example,
we would like to use open standards (working with
all operating systems and browsers), free software
(that volunteers need not buy), and the server 
environment given at our high bandwidth host.

All these ideas are very helpful and exciting.
However, together with the projects that are already
going on  (e.g. to establish cooperations, to improve the 
website, and to make recordings at various conferences),
this will be a lot of work, so that with the current number
of volunteers progress can only be slow.

We would therefore be glad if further colleagues
would consider joining our informal mailing list
(just reply to this e-mail). Note that  it is important 
to us that nobody feels excluded when (hopefully) 
exciting developments will take shape. Therefore, 
please let us know if you are interested.

In particular, we are currently looking for colleagues
who plan to visit one of the upcoming CL related 
conferences and workshops, and might be able to 
record some of the presentations that they would 
attend anyway. This is not difficult at all, and we 
would be able to provide instructions and possibly 
equipment. Conference organizers will usually
appreciate this and may offer some privileges
(policies as yet to be established).

Many thanks again and with kind regards,

Reinhard


----- Original Message ----- 

From: "Reinhard Rapp" <reinhardrapp at gmx.de>
To: <corpora at uib.no>
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 12:22 PM
Subject: ACL Video Archive - invitation to participate

Dear Colleagues,

The advances in video technology and broadband 
communication have made it possible that in 
the research centres of many large companies
scientific presentations are nowadays routinely
recorded on video and made available via network 
to employees who are interested but can not attend 
in person. Although these are normally in-house
activities that go unnoticed by the public, in some 
cases such videos have been published on the 
internet, e.g. at 

http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayinst.aspx?fID=880

(Thanks to Ken Church for pointing this out.)

Obvious advantages of videos are the independence 
of time and location, time and cost savings, and that 
presenters can reach a wider audience without additional 
effort.

In acknowledging these developments, at last year's 
ACL conference in Prague, as one of the new ACL 
initiatives, it has been suggested to also start 
such activities in computational linguistics, and 
in the meantime a video archive with some sample 
videos has been set up at

http://www.aclweb.org/videoarchive

Although there are many other video websites around,
none of them is specialized in computational linguistics,
and none of them seems to solve the true bottleneck,
which is that currently hardly any recordings are being 
made at computational linguistics conferences, research 
seminars, and other meetings.

What we therefore propose is to do so in the framework
of a community driven non-profit initiative, comparable 
in spirit to wikipedia or open source software.

As high quality presentations worth being recorded 
are given at places all over the world, none of us can 
attend them all. Therefore, the success of this initiative 
will depend on the support by volunteers who make 
the recordings, and of course of the presenters who, 
in the best spirit of international scientific communication, 
are generous enough to allow the free publication of their 
invaluable work.

We would therefore be grateful for any support that 
you might be able to provide: Be it knowledge on
existing recordings, ideas about new recordings,
help with making recordings, and technical, legal,
or any other advise. For example, if you happen to 
know about freely available CL videos that are hosted 
elsewhere, we will be happy to link to them from the 
video archive. It is a wide field where mostly enthusiasm 
counts and where probably all of us can make a 
contribution.

Therefore, if you have some interest in such matters, 
we would be glad if you could let us know your
e-mail address, so that among all interested (and
without bothering the others) we can start a discussion 
what our goals should be, and how together we can 
achieve them.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Bonnie Dorr, Dragomir Radev
Reinhard Rapp, Chris Biemann


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