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Detailed Information
Organising and interpreting large and heterogeneous data sets is a challenge with the large quantities of data produced by social science research. Synchronising video files and system logs, organising digitized video files, replaying the information in meaningful ways, and adding meta data to enable the analysis of these data sets are all motivation for the development of the Digital Replay System. Much current research involves the use of many separate tools, often not tailored to the job at hand. The DRS intends to bring together and extend the functionality of these tools to enable social science researchers to gain maximum information from their collected data.
Some features of the system will now be presented.
The Project Browser helps the user to organise data into units of work called Analyses.
The Track View presents the user with a time-ordered overview of the time based data sets, such as log files, audio, video etc.
In this example, several tracks are present (top to bottom): a free-text annotation track, an audio track, a system log file with events marked on the track, a video track and a coding track. Using the track view videos can be synchronized with other media simply by dragging. Reference frames from the video can be displayed in the track view as required by the user.
The data itself is replayed in a relevant viewer. Each viewer presents its data according to the current replay time - in other words, for example, the current line of a log file is highlighted, or the appropriate frame of a video shown. In turn, the system replay time can be set using these viewers: selecting a line in the log viewer will shuttle all other data viewers to that particular time, for instance.
A typical viewer arrangement might be:
In addition to the actual replay and annotation of data sets, the DRS will also enable the user to perform tasks with their data files that aid the organisation of their data sets. These tasks include the organising of data with the project browser, the storage of meta information about files, the conversion of video files to other formats, and the ability to synchronize the files within an analysis session.
Getting the Digital Replay System
Testing versions will be released at at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/replaytool .
The released versions of DRS can be found on Sourceforge - these may lag behind current development versions though. Please mail the DReSS development team {apf,cmg}@cs.nott.ac.uk for more information about this current development, or with any questions or feedback you may have. The software is open source and the developers would like to make the software available for testing - please email to check the current development status.