The Media Suite is one of the research environments developed within CLARIAH, the Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. The Media Suite provides centralized access to several collections from Dutch cultural heritage and knowledge institutions (among others: The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, EYE Film Museum and DANS). In addition to institution-provided metadata, several collections have been enriched through Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) of audiovisual materials and optical character recognition (OCR) of text materials, making collections more searchable.

Furthermore, as a research environment, the Media Suite aims to support scholars in all the steps of their research process, from exploratory forays into the available data to the analysis itself. Its web-based workspace allows researchers to create user projects where they can bookmark items and queries and annotate materials. The annotation capabilities include segmentation of images, audio and video. The environment’s tools facilitate among other approaches exploratory research and browsing, close reading and qualitative analysis as well as data-driven modes of distant reading and visualization of collection data.

This workshop will be a hands-on introduction to all these aspects of the Media Suite, guiding participants into creating, annotating and analyzing a corpus of materials from different collections available in the environment.