You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘YouTube’ tag.
For those of us who are incessantly scanning the Internet in search of quality material concerning scholarly research and cultural analysis, I am glad to ease your frenzy by drawing your attention to some new online resources that have been launched recently.
First of all, YouTube started an educational channel: YouTube EDU. The campus content of more than a 100 colleges that already had channels on YouTube has been brought together on one page. The obvious benefit of this aggregation is of course the increased search function this platform offers, where these university lectures were much harder to find in the popular mass (mess?) of the general YouTube site content.
In the directory you can find which universities participate. Strange enough these are almost exclusively US universities as far as I can see (and an Indian), where are Europe’s finest for example? What about incorporating Fora.tv, that also has a channel on YouTube? Or the European Graduate School (EGS) channel? Or authors@google? Of course we need to take into account that the platform only launched a few days ago, but let’s look at some features that could be improved or that still need to be thought over.
What about the possibility of searching by genre or subject? Sites like videolectures.net do offer this very convenient service. Another question concerning these kind of meta 
portals or aggregators of quality online video content, is what to include. It seems that YouTube EDU only includes content from universities. In an ideal situation, should we have a platform that distinguishes between university lectures (graduate and undergraduate?), lectures given at conferences and symposia, and lectures for the general public? Should we develop some sort of quality standards for online lectures or video content? For now the only quality criteria seem to be most viewed, most subscribed, latest addition or highest rated, all user generated quality measurements, next to the occasional editorial picks or favorites. Of course their is the brand name and reputation of the different universities and of the scholars given the lectures, but these for now seem to be the only filter functions, which to my feeling are still rather arbitrary.
But still, it is a step in the right direction and as far as YouTube EDU is concerned I am definitely watching the lecture underneath.
This feeling of randomness is also brought about by the growing amount of platforms for quality content. Via Techcrunch, I learned about Academic Earth, also newly launched, which collects content from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton, and thus also functions as an aggregation platform. Here you can search by subject, by instructor and by university, and it has a playlist section which features thematic collections of lectures selected by their editors. Another bonus point is that the interface lay out is very soothing and calm. As far as content is concerned, I do not want to be too morbid, but this 26 courses lecture series on Death (with short summaries of every lecture – very nice!) actually looks very interesting.
A final newly launched resource I would like to focus on is the World Digital Library (WDL), which will be launched on April the 21st by the UNESCO, Library of Congress and 32 partners. You can see the prototype here. From the project website:
“The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.”
You can see a website demonstration here. Some additional information from the press release:
“The WDL will function in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, and will include content in a great many other languages. Browse and search features will facilitate cross-cultural and cross-temporal exploration on the site. Descriptions of each item and videos with expert curators speaking about selected items will provide context for users, and are intended to spark curiosity and encourage both students and the general public to learn more about the cultural heritage of all countries.”
Next to a European library (Europeana), we now have the opportunity to find, search and explore the hidden treasures of digitized library and archive collections from cultural institutions from all over the world. What a wonder, what a great potential knowledge base! I for one am very curious about the site. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed they have a more fortunate launch than Europeana.
In previous blog posts I mentioned the rise of video surfing and the development of the Internet from a text based medium to one based on remixed mediality, increasingly dominated by an image based culture. This YouTubification of the Internet is seen by some people as a bad development which can be detrimental to our culture. Next to that, as also mentioned before, this development can mean an inevitable loss to the mental and social capabilities of the human species as a whole and could ruin its further cognitive development.
Luckily, there is also good news! Using Andrew Keens figure of speech, the experts are fighting back! The last years have seen an up rise of high quality video content on the web. For today I would like to focus on one specific sub category: video lectures. Probably the most well-known video lecture site on the web is TED. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design and goes by the motto ‘ideas worth spreading’. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. TED has a very nice visual based interface and the site can be searched by theme, by speaker, by most watched etc. From the website:
“The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. Today, TED is therefore best thought of as a global community. It’s a community welcoming people from every discipline and culture who have just two things in common: they seek a deeper understanding of the world, and they hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all.
FORA.tv has a broader scope and is in this way more eclectic, and although it lacks the nice interface it does also harvest some very interesting lectures and other kinds of video content. It includes a very nice section on music, which not only covers lectures on different kinds of music but also lectures about the music business and lectures from some renowned musicians and performers. From the website: 
“FORA.tv is the leading interactive viewing experience of the smartest, most entertaining video content in the world. —The world of ideas and knowledge—all drawn from the live-event speeches, discussions, interviews and debates going on everywhere all the time at the world’s leading conferences, ideas festivals, think tanks and other major centers of thought and discourse.”
Where the above mentioned sites mostly aggregate content from – let’s just call it more – ‘popular science’ and lectures given at specific conferences, there is also a movement towards high quality scientific video content on the web. Videolectures.net was discussed in a previous post and states that it uses a peer review process as a filter mechanism for quality content. The team from videolectures.net is flying all over the world to tape top conferences in order to serve the scientific community. From the Website:
“The main purpose of the project Videolectures.Net is to provide free and open access of a high quality video lectures presented by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science. The portal is aimed at promoting science, exchanging ideas and fostering knowledge sharing by providing high quality didactic contents not only to a scientific community but also to a general public. All lectures, accompanying documents, information and links are systematically selected and classified through the editorial process taking into account also users’ comments.”
YouTube is also pitching in however! In cooperation with some of the most renowned institutions for higher education in the world, you can find recordings of all different kinds of lectures on the institutions own YouTube channels. My new favorite channel is the one from the European Graduate School (http://nl.youtube.com/user/egsvideo). Since I have a philosophy background and an immense fondness for everything that has anything remotely to do with culture and society, the European Graduate School is a perfect resource. Here you can find lectures from some of the greatest thinkers like Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou and many others.
Next to the EGS, many other top institutions have their own YouTube channel, for instance Berkeley and MIT. Just think about all the opportunities this offers you to broaden your world and expand your mind, all from the convenience of your own lazy chair! Just skip your favorite Soap Opera for once and watch and listen to one or more of these genius minds! As a final statement, here is one from Slavoj Zizek, promoting the EGS:
Two updates on things I wrote about in previous posts. First of all, The New York Times picked up the discussion on the use of You Tube as a search engine, or better yet, as the NYT calls it, as a reference tool. They wrote a very nice article (published in print on January 18th) which summarizes the different things that were already mentioned about this phenomenon in the blogosphere. The article also mentions Blinkx, a video search engine, which is actually very cool and indexes various online video platforms (YouTube, MySpace, Google Video etc.) so check it out. Funny though, how an established (print) medium like The New York Times uses the blogosphere to retrieve its content on current issues….
The second update is on some new evidence for the, what I have now rebaptised as, NIN-model (sorry Radiohead), based on the new digital Maecenic (now community based) culture, or as an article in Techdirt calls it, the turning-your-fans-into-promoters model. At the Monty Python’s YouTube channel, videos from Britains best comedy show ever, are streamed online, in High Quality versions. From the site:
“No more of those crap quality videos you’ve been posting. We’re giving you the real thing – HQ videos delivered straight from our vault. What’s more, we’re taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new HQ versions. And what’s even more, we’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”
They have of course linked to Amazon, where you can buy their DVD’s directly, and yes, it worked again, helping them climb to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list.
Way to go Pythons!
As a follow up on my post on the Reading and Watching conference a few weeks ago, I recently came about this very nice post by Michael Bhaskar over at The Digitalist. In his post Bhaskar talks about a blog post from ReadWriteWeb in which a trend amongst the new YouTube generation is discussed. Instead of using the search function from Google, they are typing questions directly into YouTube. It seems that the new generation is increasingly preferring the video based search results from YouTube to Google’s text based results. Bhaskar goes on to reflect on the developement from a text based culture to an image based culture and the inevitable loss this will mean to the mental and social capabilities of the human species as a whole, as Bhaskar sees reflected in the book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf.
Bhaskar states his worries as follows:
“But this is something we should be thinking a about. While in many ways we live in, and have always lived in, an illiterate culture (and I mean this in a non-pejorative sense), think say of the non text entertainment industries stacked against the text based, this further evolution of a non-text culture presents a profound shift. If people are largely not reading then the very biology of human thought will change, and not for the better. As a species we will be less able to empathise, less able to imagine and less able to articulate and formulate complex thoughts.”
This seems to concur with the visions of Adriana Bus and Raymond Mar, who both state that reading (fiction) is essential for the development of mental conceptions and social and personal development.
However, I do not think Bhaskar’s vision of a future evolution away from a text based culture and a text based Internet will come about so soon, as text itself and the way we are reading is also changing. As I wrote in my post about Text comparison and digital creativity, David Crystal and Adriaan van der Weel both discussed the inherent properties of the different media. It is important in this respect that, as Van der Weel states, texts are changing under the influence of the digital media (medial transformativity) and are also adapting themselves to the digital environment. As David Chrystal remarks, Digitally Mediated Communication (DMC) deploys properties of both writing and speech. So it is very well possible that text will evolve and hybrids will exist in a new online world filled with remixed mediality. And this will probably involve the growth of all kinds of new elaborate mental conceptions and abilities, better suited to these new conditions.
Recent Comments