0.13 Evia, sustainability, and mission-creep

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EVIA (Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis) is a Mellon-funded project that collects video made by ethnographers in order to preserve it and make it available to scholars and teachers. EVIA is a joint effort of the Indiana University and the University of Michigan, and Alan Burdette’s paper for this conference describes it as “unique in its combination of preservation, annotation, and scholarly publishing.” The order of those words is significant; in the “Premise and Mission” section of his paper, Burdette elaborates:

The primary mission of the EVIA Project is to preserve ethnographic field video created by scholars as part of their research. The secondary mission is to make those materials available in conjunction with rich, descriptive annotations, creating a unique resource for scholars, instructors, and students. The EVIA Project was initially driven by a realization that a large amount of research video had not been deposited in institutional archives and was instead stored in personal collections in improper conditions with little or no access to anyone besides the scholar who made the recordings. . . . The ability to preserve these recordings and make them available to other scholars is a cornerstone of the EVIA Project. (190-1)

It makes sense to put preservation first in the mission statement because if these video recordings aren’t preserved, they can’t be made available, can’t be annotated, etc. That much is true of any cultural heritage information you might choose to preserve—but there’s an added urgency in the case of the material that EVIA deals with, because it is observational data, and because it is recorded on ephemeral media. Unlike books, magazines, recorded music, commercial films, or many other facets of the cultural record, these ethnographic videos are unique documents of a unique event. In that respect, they are like some kinds of scientific data, which can only be gathered as an event unfolds. And, as Burdette notes,

…the archival shelf life of videotape is extremely short. Although based on formats similar to audiotape in principle, the density of the magnetic information on videotape and the more complex manner with which it must be retrieved result in more rapid deterioration of the signal than we see in audio. Video recording formats have also experienced a higher level of obsolescence compared to audio. (198)

However, as we read Burdette’s paper, an interesting thing happens: the preservation objective recedes into the background, and it is replaced by two other topics, each energetically described, but I think described by different authors with some unreconciled differences in their perspectives and priorities. In all, I think I can trace three camps in this one paper: in the work the paper describes, the preservation camp seems to have lost out to the other two, which are focused, respectively, on peer-review and software development. Reading the account of the project in Burdette’s paper, I would predict that preservation, should it happen, will occur in spite of these other two activities, and not because of them.