Digital tools for annotation of video have the promise to provide immense value to researchers in disciplines ranging from psychology to computer science to ethnography. With the traditional methods for annotation being cumbersome, time-consuming, and frustrating, technological solutions are situated to aid in video annotation by increasing reliability, repeatability, and workflow optimizations. Three notable limitations of existing video annotation tools are lack of support for the annotation workflow, poor representation of data on a timeline, and poor interaction techniques with video, data, and annotations. Our model is a new system called VCode and VData. The benefit of our system is that is directly addresses the workflow and needs of both researchers and video coders.

VCode and VData are a suite of “open source” applications which create a set of effective interfaces supporting the video annotation workflow . Our system has three main components: VCode (annotation), VCode Admin Window (configuration) and VData (examination of data, coder agreement and training). The Design of VCode and VData was grounded in existing literature, interviews with experienced coders, and ongoing discussions with researchers in multiple disciplines.

• VCode and VData: Illustrating a new Framework for Supporting the Video Annotation Workflow
  Extended Abstracts of AVI - 2008