Instrumental genesis through interdisciplinary collaboration – reflections on the emergence of a visualisation framework for video annotation data
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Instrumental genesis through interdisciplinary collaboration-reflections on the emergence of a visualisation framework for video annotation data XML This paper presents, discusses and reflects on the development of a visualization framework for the analysis of the temporal dynamics of audiovisual expressivity. The main focus lies on the instrumental genesis process (Rabardel 1995; Longchamp 2012)-a concept trying to express and analyze the co-evolution of instruments and the practices they make possible-underlying this development. It is described through the collaboration and communication processes between computer science scholars and humanities scholars in finding new ways of visualizing complex datasets for exploration and presentation in the realm of film-studies research. It draws on the outcome and concrete usage of the visualizations in publications and presentations of a research group, the AdAproject, that investigates the audiovisual rhetorics of affect in audiovisual media on the financial crisis (2007-). These film analyses are based on theoretical assumptions on the process of film-viewing, the relation of the viewer's perception and the temporally unfolding audiovisual images, and a methodical approach that draws on 'steps' in the research process such as segmentation, description and qualification, called eMAEX (Kappelhoff et al. 2011-2016) to reconstruct these experiential figurations (Bakels et al. 2020a, 2020b). The main focus of this paper is the process of iterative development of visualizations as interactive interfaces generated with the open-source software Advene, that were an integral part of the research process. In this regard, the timeline visualization is not only of interest for visual argumentation in (digital) humanities publications, but also for the creation of annotations as well as the exploration of this data. In the first part of the paper we describe this interdisciplinary collaboration as instrumental genesis on a general level-as an evolving and iterative process. In the second part we focus on the specific challenge of designing a visualization framework for the temporal dynamics of audiovisual aesthetics. Lastly we zoom out by reflecting on experiences and insights that might be of interest for the wider digital humanities community.
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