Media Suite

The CLARIAH Media Suite is a research environment of the Dutch infrastructure for digital humanities and social science. It facilitates scholarly research with large Dutch media collections by providing advanced search and analysis tools.

Overview

  • The CLARIAH Media Suite is an application for doing research with data collections by scholars and students at universities and in higher education (e.g., film, television, and other media scholars, oral historians, and political historians). It consists of three building blocks: data, tools to work with the data, and a workspace to store your work with the data.
  • The Media Suite is an innovative digital research environment, an experimental environment (LAB) , in which we are experimenting with new ways of working with multimedia data collections.
  • It caters to various levels of expertise and research interests: from providing access to many audio-visual collections for exploratory research to close reading; and from more complex modes of data analysis to distant reading strategies.
  • The transparent search and analysis tools that the Media Suite offers, combined with its APIs that can be used with Jupyter notebooks, allow for many new possibilities for research and represents the middle ground between full algorithmic literacy and being a data novice.
  • Users from Dutch universities and research institutes can log into the Media Suite using their university credentials. Read more about access to the Media Suite.

Data

Via the CLARIAH infrastructure, the Media Suite provides access to data collections in Dutch archives (among others: The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, EYE Film Museum collections, DANS oral history interview collections, collections from the Open Images Project). Typically, data collections are registered in a registry that allows the infastructure to either access collections directly or use some form of data harvesting to enables access.

More about our data:

Tools

As a research environment, the CLARIAH Media Suite aims to support scholars in all the steps of their research process. At a general level, it provides tools for exploring the data and collections, creating personal selections (or corpora), adding annotations (such as tags, comments, links, and other metadata), and the possibility to export them. The Media Suite also facilitates working with data directly by using its APIs in combination with Jupyter Notebooks. Workspace

Workspace

The CLARIAH Media Suite offers a “virtual work space” to its users. It allows researchers to store bookmarks, annotations, saved queries, personal collections, or automatic enrichments. The workspace thus provides researchers with novel ways for making transparent and managing their research process.

Learn

Instruction and support

The Media Suite Learn pages offer a wide set instruction and support material:

Advice and user support

  • Media Suite Learn team aims to support a wide array of approaches and areas of teaching and research, and are happy to offer advice on how to use the Media Suite productively in your own project. You can contact the team via mediastudies@clariah.nl.
  • The team regularly contributes to organising research events that introduce the Media Suite to new users, and that reflect on digital methods and videographic approaches more broadly. Events include online webinars and public research seminars focussing on state-of-the-art digital scholarship, with contributions from scholars from the Netherlands and abroad.

Public forum

The Media Suite Public Forum uses Gitter, an open source instant messaging and chat room system. To start chatting, you would need to have either a Twitter or Github account.

Mentions

Publications

  • Aasman, S., Melgar Estrada, L., Slootweg, T. & Wegter, R., (2019). Tales of a Tool Encounter: Exploring Video Annotation for Doing Media History, VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture, Special Issue on Audiovisual Data in Digital Humanities, eds. Pelle Snickars, Mark Williams and Andreas Fickers, Spring 2019. Open access, online multi-media article.
  • Ashkpour, A., Merono-Penuela, A., & Mandemakers, K. (2015). The Aggregate Dutch Historical Censuses: Harmonization and RDF. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 48(4), 230-245. (PDF)
  • Bilgin, A., Sang, E.T.K., Smeenk, K., Hollink, L., van Ossenbruggen, J., Harbers, F. and Broersma, M. (2018). Utilizing a Transparency-driven Environment toward Trusted Automatic Genre Classification: A Case Study in Journalism History. Proceedings 14th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science) (pp. 486-496). IEEE.
  • Bloothooft, G., Oosterlaken, R., Reynaert, M., Depuydt, K., Schoonheim, T. (2018). NAMES: Towards gold standards for personal names. DHBenelux conference 2018.
  • Broersma, M., & Harbers, F. Eds. (2019). Dossier CLARIAH Media projects. Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis/Journal for Media History.

See all publications

Presentations

  • Erp, M. van. A philosophy of change, Institute for Social Work, Utrecht, 12 december 2018
  • Dijk, J. van. Towards Semantic enrichment of Newspapers: A Historical Ecology use case, Amsterdam, 28 december 2017

See all presentations

Webpages

  • ‘Big Heritage Data’ in Media Suite, Beeld en geluid
    • Media Suite makes ‘Big Heritage Data’ accessible for research, DANS

Video’s

  • Talkshow Mediasuite // Data Stories, Dutch Media Week