SUMMARY
When the timelines of edited film sequences are exported, then they are flattened into an "Edit Decision List" that is somewhat analogous to a musical playlist and an academic syllabus or H20 playlist.UPDATE: I explore the how this playlist concept can be applied to filmmaking in conversations with Lucas Gonze, Colin Brumelle and Farsheed
JD Lasica just posted a video interview with Molly Krause of Harvard's H20 playlist project.
You can think of H20 as a way to share a college class syllabus. It's an ordered reading list that can be used to aggregate knowledge from experts. They describe it as an "open source, educational platform that explores powerful ways to connect professors, students, and researchers online."
Here's an example of a H20 reading list that should give you an introduction to "Social Bookmarking with Del.icio.us" written by Brian Del Vecchio.
H20 tracks derivatives made from playlists as a way to track the relative authority, expertise and reputation of a given author -- much in the same way that academic citations in peer review journals are a way to measure these same metrics. But the H20 playlist format decentralizes this process from the normal gatekeepers and allows for a much more grassroots and bottom-up approach to this concept.
So as Krause says in the interview, you can think of these playlists as a way to provide guided maps to particular fields of study.
My understanding is that playlists have gained a lot of popularity because it is a way for people to create sequences of songs to play on their computer or mobile devices. Because more and more individual songs are being digitally distributed and separated by the order in which they usually play on an entire music album, then playlists have been able to recreate these musical experiences much in the same way that DJs have done.
So Harvard has expanded this playlist concept from music to academic information, and I would like to expand it even further to a journalistic and filmmaking context.
Netflix is already using the playlist concept for distribution of DVDs with their "Netflix Queue." You select videos that you want to see, and then you determine the order in which you receive them.
This can be extended to the actual generation of films because filmmakers are essentially doing the same thing except with multiple video and audio dimensions synchronized by timelines and smaller nuggets of information (i.e. a sound bite vs. an entire DVD).
When the timelines of edited film sequences are exported, then they are flattened into an "Edit Decision List" that is analogous to a musical playlist and an academic syllabus or H20 playlist.
Edit Decision Lists can be generated with a web browser interface, and then dynamically translated into online edits by using the SMIL open standards -- or into offline edits by using Final Cut Pro XML interface that I've described before. I've been able to successfully accopmlish both of these in the tests that I've done.
Most people get completely lost by this point, but I'm basically exploring the idea of using playlists for the collaborative generation of media much in the same way that Harvard is exploring playlists for the collaborative distribution of knowledge.
I was very happy to discover that H20 backend has been open sourced, however the code was a bit too complex for me to parse.
But I'd love to catalyze an effort to port some of these concepts from H20, and into Drupal.
I've been in contact with the two Drupal developers of the playlist module, and I hope to talk to them more about it soon.
I also happened to meet "playlist maven" Lucas Gonze of WebJay.com at the Open Media Developers Summit, and may pick his brain about the function and culture around playlists -- as well as best practices for tracking related and derivative playlists.
So with that, I'll share the e-mail and comment below that I just sent off to OurMedia.org's JD Lasica (whom I also had the chance to meet at the summit)...
JD,
Your post on H20 couldn't have come at a better time.I'm in the midst of exploring a lot of the issues discussed in your interview, and I took the opportunity to leave a blog-length comment to the post as a way to do a brain dump on the thoughts that I've been having about it.
Below is the comment that I left.
I'd love to talk to more about getting this into Drupal with you, there is definitely a lot of potential for using the playlist concept for remixes when you add the element of being able to excerpt video/audio clips by using SMIL.
So I'm planning on talking to one of the playlist module developers at Bryght (i.e. Colin) soon -- possibly today.
As far as I can tell, the playlist concept has only made it as far as an audio context, but there are clearly other information and filmmaking contexts as well.
I'll be testing my Skype recording setup, and plan on sharing the conversation as a podcast ( http://www.echochamberproject.com/recordingskype )
Let me know if you are interested in exploring some of the ideas I throw out in the comment below by having a Skype chat.
Thanks,
-Kent.JD,
Thanks for sharing this interview.Playlists have been on my mind a lot lately for how to coordinate collaborative film editing -- as well as collaborative journalism.
It was interesting to hear Krause talk about the parallels between iTunes playlists being a way to "make everyone a DJ", and how H20 playlists can be a way to share syllabi between academics -- and possibly catalyzing collaboration and cross-disiplinary research.
These playlist/syllabus camparasion can be taken a step further with filmmaking with what is know as "Edit Decision Lists" or EDLs -- which is essentially an ordered list of sound bite sequences. A playlist could be used to make film edits or remixes of existing material.
I think the H20 project demonstrates the power of playlists for being able to share knowledge that is aggregated by domain experts -- something that wikipedia's NPOV collaboration policy does not account for as well -- and that Nicholas Carr discussed in his "The amorality of Web 2.0" essay.
At the moment, journalistic news articles contain stream of facts, but if the facts were more granular, then they could be assembled in playlists that are able to track better track the associations between them.
So I see a lot of potential for how this playlist concept could be applied to citizen journalism, and being able to tap into the wisdom of the crowd. Especially how the H20 setup is currently being used to track the reputation and trust of authoritative playlists by how many people are creating deriviatives from them.
Anyway, I'm very much interesting in getting this functionality into Drupal, and plan on talking to the playlist module developers about it soon.