[Reader-list] Workshop with pad.ma, Bangalore 16-19 July

[shaina a]

*From Archive to Application* (and Back)
A workshop with Pad.ma

*Open House *
Friday, 16th July, 6:30 pm
at
1 Shanti Road <http://www.1shanthiroad.com/>, Bangalore

With Suresh Jayaram, Nishant Shah, Ayisha Abraham and from the pad.ma team-
Namita Malhotra, Sanjay Bhangar, Subuhi Jiwani and Zinnia Ambapardiwala.

*Followed by
Weekend workshop* *in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and
Society, <http://www.cis-india.org/> Bangalore*
17th and 18th July 2010.
at Jaaga <http://jaaga.wikidot.com/>, Bangalore.
(To participate, write to pad.ma at pad.ma)

For about two years now, Pad.ma has been running as an online archive of
digital video with text annotations. During this period, the focus has been
on gathering materials, annotating densely, and building an archive. At
present, pad.ma has over 400 hours of footage, in over 600 "events". Almost
all of this material is fully transcribed and is often mapped to physical
locations. Essays have been written over videos, and narratives created
across different clips in the archive. The focus has been on pulling
material into the archive.

What are ways to start thinking about pulling material out of pad.ma? From
the onset, pad.ma has had an API (documented at http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/API),
a programming interface that allows you to pull out videos, perform
searches, seek to exact time-codes in any video, fetch transcript and map
data, and display all this however you please. Also Pad.ma's General Public
License (PGPL, http://pad.ma/license) is designed specifically for the reuse
of the material on pad.ma. Through the experience of running the archive,
there have been various imaginations of multiple and layered forms of
time-based annotation over video, including for: pedagogical tools for
learning and discussion; presentation tools that combine text and video in
new ways, essays and other writing formats enabled by rich and
context-specific media.

At this workshop, we hope to explore some of these ideas for video on the
web, and video's new qualities as a result of online practices. We invite
video-makers, coders, writers, artists, students, and other enthusiasts to
participate. Considering the term "application" in a broad sense, we invite
video material, texts or software that, combined with existing materials and
tools in pad.ma, can become innovative kinds of "output", or new forms.
These would also then feedback into the archive, and how we imagine its
future.

After a hands-on introduction to pad.ma and its possibilities and tools, the
workshop will break up into streams for content and code. On day two, these
streams come back together.

*In the content stream, participants could: *

- bring in their own footage, clips from popular or unpopular cinema,
science or lab videos, ads or news, artworks or documentary films, to
assemble into new forms, using pad.ma's tools.
- bring together shots, scenes or sounds from fiction or non-fiction films,
and make a new 'movie' or create a 'running commentary' alongside.
- write over video in pad.ma critically or creatively: theorise or
contextualise footage, write collaborativey, or weave fiction and/or poetry
with moving images.
- create teaching units or illustrated lectures using pad.ma
- begin a research project or map a phenomenon through video and text.

*In the code stream, participants could: *

- devise new ways in which video and text can speak to each other, and to an
online audience.
- For developers, this 2-day workshop is an opportunity to experiment with
the newest web-video technologies. Concretely, we will cover some background
and history of HTML 5 <video>, understand how the pad.ma website works with
time-based annotations, server-side seeking of video, etc. and finally work
on hacking on applications / prototypes using the pad.ma API (
http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/API). The developer track of this 2-day workshop is
open to all, but knowledge of HTML, CSS and / or javascript would be useful.


By end of day 1, we hope to have interesting content and application
projects that could be developed (individually or in groups) through the
night and following day. Planning ahead will help, so: *video-makers,
artists, writers, researchers and coders, write to us *with a one-line bio
and project idea, and a confirmation of your participation at pad.ma at pad.ma


Some reading around http://pad.ma:


   - pad.ma's current newsletter: http://pad.ma/newsletter/2010-05-26.html


   - 10 Theses on the Archive:
   http://pad.ma/texts/10_Theses_on_the_Archive.html


   - A reader on Archives: http://files.pad.ma/beirut/Archive_Reader/


   - How to use pad.ma guide: http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/HowTo


   - Pad.ma API : http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/API

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Pad.ma is an interpretative web-based video archive, which works primarily
with footage and not finished films. Pad.ma creates access to material which
is easily lost in editing processes, in the filmmaking economy, and in
changes of scale brought about by digital technology. Unlike Youtube and
similar video sites, the focus here is on annotation, cross-linking,
downloading and the reuse of video material for research, pedagogy and
reference. For more, see http://pad.ma/about.

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