[Corpora-List] ACL Video Archive - invitation to participate

[Reinhard Rapp]

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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