Crowdsourcing the indexing of film and television media

In this paper we describe a project that explores how advances in information technology could be used to make film and television media more accessible to both scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. By indexing, at a detailed level, a range of time-synchronized and non-time-synchronized elements in a test collection of 12 films and 8 television programs, we demonstrate how structured data representing many aspects of media content can be produced in a streamlined manner, and discuss how this work could potentially be augmented with automated indexing to be more efficient. We present examples of how this data can be utilized to produce a variety of tools and artifacts that make film and television media more accessible, and suggest that crowdsourcing could be an effective strategy for accomplishing this work on a larger scale. This research contributes to the growing body of literature exploring how multimedia collections can be made more accessible and useful for a variety of purposes.