Roles and Reusability of Video Data in Social Studies of Interaction: SCARP Case Study No. 5 Summary and Recommendations

Abstract

Social science researchers are making increasing use of digital video. All of us, researchers or not, have an alluring range of commercial web sites for sharing video, although these do not cater for long-term reuse of video in research. But what kind of roles does video fulfil as research data? And what curation issues and challenges does video raise for researchers and their institutions? The phenomenal growth in public use of digital video is a topic of social research; in the first six months of 2008, users of Youtube uploaded more video footage than the top three U.S. TV networks would have broadcast if they had been operating 24 hours per day over their sixty-year lifespan (Wesch, 2008). Yet there have been few studies of social scientists’ own uses of digital video data in their research.