ABSTRACT
This chapter is an introduction to an innovative Internet-based model of multimedia-based research. Our Integrated Temporal Multimedia Data (ITMD) Research System incorporates new research practices and emerging digital technologies into a system that we believe will dramatically enhance the ways social scientists record and analyze complex social events and share their conclusions. The ITMD system and the new methods it allows, promises to transform social science research in four profound, interconnected ways:
Capturing events by recording a theoretically unlimited number of temporal (i.e., time-coded) digital data streams (audio, video, computer screens, biometric data, etc.) and integrating and synchronizing these streams into flexibly blended, temporally based representations;
Supporting a theoretically unlimited number and type of analyses with both existing and new analysis tools and blending analytical representations with temporal event representations;
Enabling real-time and asynchronous collaboration among teams of distributed researchers in recording, analyzing, and sharing of large-scale temporal multimedia data sets; and
Supporting the distillation of high-bandwidth, multistream multimedia data into research products that can be disseminated through Web-based, DVD/CD-based, and traditional means.
