Cinélab was a two year project (2007-2008) funded by the french National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche)

It is now over. One of its outcomes is the specification of the Cinelab data model/format.

Project presentation

Partners

Antenna Audio, Forum des Images, Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation (CentrePompidou), LIRIS

Motivations and context

Recent technological breakthroughs, especially in the field of metadata description and communication (mobility, ubiquity, trans-reality), allow cultural actors to enter the field of mass-consumption. They however seldom take advantage of the convergence of these technologies and of the emergence of new user communities, organized in social networks centered on appropriation, customization and sharing of corpuses and knowledge.

The Cinelab project is developed in the light of this convergence of technologies and in a mass-culture domain (movies). It aims at exploring the combination of technologies of enrichment, multi-support publication (Rich Media) and appropriation/customization/sharing through recent communication technologies (from desktop devices to mobile devices), in order to build active-reader communities.

An active-reader is an amateur questioning his/her relationship with art, reacting and enriching existing corpuses by analyses and annotations. Helped by technological devices and working in a community, he/she is the XXI century amateur. The Cinelab projects thus belongs to the Web 2.0 trend.

This context allows the emergence of new practices, from the most scholar to the most simple: professional critics, pedagogy activities, moviegoers exchanges, leisure activities...

Aims

The Cinelab project deals with two aspects of the call for projects from the ANR (structured archiving for media, and mobility) and aims at studying, developing and experimentally validating a software to annotate movies and produce new contents from these annotations. Annotation may include audio commentaries, photographs, note-taking on different devices including mobile devices. Annotations must remain independent from the analysed/commented movie, in order to be freely shareable, and respect the integrity of the movie in whatever form it is (DVD, video file, streaming video). Annotations are organised along description schemes, and can be shared in a typical Web 2.0 fashion.

The Cinelab project main focuses are :

• Modelling the usages and description schemes for movie critics.
• Defining description and annotation models
• Building mobile and multimodal interfaces
• Community-sharing of annotations and critics