Human Communication Audio-Visual Archive for University College London
The CAVA (human Communication: an Audio-Visual Archive) project will establish a repository for audio-visual data on real-life human communication for spoken and signed languages, initially populated with a minimum of 600 hours of rights-cleared digital content owned by UCL (University College London) researchers. CAVA is a collaboration between UCL and the UK Data Archive.
Historically, the study of communication has been based on highly-controlled experimental data, but a better understanding comes from examining natural audio-visual data. CAVA will create a repository of re-usable video material to support the work of UCL and of the international human communication research community. The UCL team already holds a large body of content, in suitable formats, with appropriate permissions secured. The data mainly comprises videotaped interactions - conversations, interviews, assessments - between a person who has atypical communication (due to disabilities such as stroke, deafness, autism etc) and their spouse, teacher, parent or another "typical"? communicator, filmed in the home, at school or in the clinic. Some of the data is longitudinal with regular sessions filmed over a period of time. Some audio-only material will also be deposited.
The CAVA repository will initially be presented through the UCL Library Services Digital Collections Service , which is DigiTool-based. To support specialist discovery, the IMDI metadata standard will be implemented, with a mapping to Dublin Core to help interoperability between CAVA repository and aggregation services. There are no IPR obstacles to the deposit and distribution, to genuine researchers, of the recordings which will be placed into the repository, but access to the video corpus and any sensitive transcripts will necessarily be limited to bona fide researchers: access procedures and processes will be developed during the project. Options for the managed long-term preservation of the large, uncompressed master video files will also be appraised in the course of the project, with the help of the UKDA.
This project has been granted a no-cost extension from March 2010 until August 2010.