DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2021
Volume 15 Number 1
2021 15.1  |  XMLPDFPrint

Audiovisualities out of Annotation: Three Case Studies in Teaching Digital Annotation with Mediate

Tiamat Fox <tfox6_at_u_dot_rochester_dot_edu>, University of Rochester

Abstract

This article describes Mediate: An Annotation Tool for Audiovisual Media, developed at the University of Rochester, and emphasizes the platform as a source for the understanding of film, television, poetry, pop songs, live performance, music, and advertising as shown in three cases studies from film and media studies, music history, and linguistics. In each case collaboration amongst students was not only key, but also enabled by Mediate, which allows students to work in groups to generate large amounts of data about audiovisual media. Further, the process of data generation produces quantitative and qualitative observation of the mediated interplay of sight and sound. A major outcome of these classes for the faculty teaching them has been the concept of audiovisualities: the physically and culturally interpenetrating modes of audiovisual experience and audiovisual inscription where hearing and seeing remediate one another for all of us as sensory and social subjects. Throughout the article, we chart how audiovisualities have emerged for students and ourselves out of digital annotation in Mediate.

Introduction[1]

It has long been a premise in the study of media that multiple senses are in play when we view movies, watch television, listen to live or recorded music, read or hear poems read aloud, and consume advertising, whether in print or on screens [Benjamin 1939] [McLuhan 1964] [Hansen 2004]. Since the late twentieth century, the interplay of seeing and hearing has yielded richly variegated writing and thinking about, on the one hand, vision and visuality and, on the other, the acoustic, the audible, and the aural. In this essay, we pursue this interplay into the digital humanities. More specifically, we advance the concept of audiovisualities in order to describe that interplay in the context of digital annotation of time-based media. In these media, seeing and hearing are inseparable and our goal is to understand how processes of digital annotation can help scholars and students investigate this entanglement. To do this, we describe a platform we have named Mediate: An Annotation Tool for Audiovisual Media, which was developed with the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Rochester and has been used in undergraduate courses across the humanities and social sciences there. In these settings, Mediate has enabled our students and ourselves to see and hear the data of our eyes and ears in reflexively collective and recursively interdisciplinary ways. This collective process in a variety of classrooms is what has brought us — three faculty members (two tenure track, one instructional track), two students (an undergraduate and a graduate student), and two staff members from the library (the programmer and the Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab) — to the concept of audiovisualities we explore in this essay.
That concept cannot be disaggregated from visual studies and sound studies, two fields that have developed alongside their more disciplinary counterparts in art history, film studies, musicology, and music theory. Broadly conceived, visual studies offers a means of understanding the expansive domain of the visual beyond what disciplines such as art history or film studies allow us to see. Wildly diverse in the directions it has taken since emerging in the late twentieth century, one of the central legacies of visual studies has been the concept of "visuality," or "sight as a social fact," which cannot be disaggregated from the act of "vision," or "sight as a physical operation" [Foster 1988]. Adapting W. J. T. Mitchell, we can think of visuality as a "dialectical concept" in which the study of "visual culture cannot rest content with a definition of its object as the social construction of the visual field, but must insist on exploring the chiastic reversal of this proposition, the visual construction of the social field. It is not just that we see the way we do because we are social animals, but also that our social arrangements take the forms they do because we are seeing animals" [Mitchell 2002].
As in visual studies, scholars working in sound studies, which took identifiable shape in the early twenty-first century, refuse to be content with a definition of its object as solely the social construction of the sonic field, but also account for the sonic construction of the social field [Bull 2013] [Novak and Sakakeeny 2015] [Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012] [Sterne 2012]. Pushing beyond logocentric and ocularcentric theoretical frameworks in various established disciplines, sound studies treats the audible and the aural, as Jonathan Sterne has put it, as "an artifact of the messy and political human sphere" [Sterne 2003]. Pondering that "artifact," three researchers exploring what they call "digital sound studies," including one of the authors of this article, have posed a question about the assumed modes in scholarship itself. "How," they ask, "can scholars write about sound in sound?" [Lingold et al. 2018].
A key effect that sound studies has had on visual studies has been to remind those working in the latter that the sights we see often go hand in hand with the sounds we hear. While Sterne's work in The Audible Past has systematized and historicized this sight-sound relation, film theorists such as Michel Chion [Chion 1994] and Kaja Silverman [Silverman 1988] and media archeologists such as Siegfried Zielinski [Zielinski 1999] [Zielinski 2006] and Bernard Stiegler [Stiegler 2014] have generatively tracked the dialectic of the visual and the audible in their work. We think of this dialectic as producing the audiovisualities — the physically and culturally interpenetrating modes of audiovisual experience and audiovisual inscription where hearing and seeing remediate one another for all of us as sensory and social subjects — that this essay aims to chart in relation to digital annotation in Mediate.
At the University of Rochester, students have used Mediate to annotate cinematic, televisual, musical, literary, and commercial media in courses housed in the Film and Media Studies Program, the Musicology Department, and the Department of Linguistics. In these courses, the audiovisual specificities of a given medium become radically legible to students in the data they yield by annotating in Mediate. Further, as we will show in this article, in exploring the medium-specific qualities of film or music or advertising in their unique material forms, cultural contexts, and social functions, we have unexpectedly ended up in a broader concept of audiovisuality that cuts across disciplinary differences. To riff on Mitchell one last time, Mediate allows us to examine the audiovisual construction of the social field as much as the social construction of the audiovisual field. Through the annotation it supports, Mediate provides a platform in which that field is no longer immediately intuited through our senses, but turned into an object of analysis — an audible and visible "exteriority" [Sterne 2003] that allows us to grasp the interplay of seeing and hearing beyond the often self-contained ways in which we process sensory data internally and individually.

Mediate and the Audiovisual State of Digital Annotation

Mediate arose out of Joel Burges's desire to have a digital tool that would enable the collection of large amounts of data about how time works on television. Originally working with Nora Dimmock, Jeff Suszczynski, and Joshua Romphf by experimenting with digital humanities projects in the classes "The Poetics of Television," "Film History, 1989-Present," and "Clocks and Computers: Visualizing Cultural Time" between 2012 and 2016, this desire gave way to the still ongoing project of developing a digital annotation tool for audiovisual media that would be of more general use. As it did, we moved from combining software such as Jubler, DaVinci Resolve, and Adobe Encore to building our own platform, primarily through the labor of Romphf [Burges et al. 2016]. Mediate is a web-based platform that allows users to upload audiovisual media; produce real-time notes; generate automated and manual annotations (which we also call markers) on the basis of customized schema; preserve the annotations as data that can be queried; and export the data in CSV and JSON formats for further exploration, interpretation, and visualization. The platform is built in Python and JavaScript, and it makes use of several open source libraries, including Django, OpenCV, FFMPEG, and React. Through websockets tied together by a REST API, Mediate supports concurrent updates of annotations added by multiple users. Mediate provides a real-time system for annotating and analyzing myriad genres that yield audiovisualities in which sight and sound come into chiastic interplay in medium-specific ways.
There are other tools like Mediate, including ELAN and NVivo, the subjects of a recent study of the audiovisual state of digital annotation [Melgar et al. 2017]. The build of ELAN and NVivo, however, make them technologically and methodologically distinct from Mediate. NVivo is not open source, while ELAN is — we hope Mediate will be open source and widely accessible in the future. Both ELAN and NVivo are desktop-based programs and have limited collaborative capabilities, whereas synchronous and asynchronous collaboration are foregrounded in Mediate. ELAN projects can only contain one media file whereas NVivo has a more multimodal approach and supports a variety of file formats, similar to Mediate. ELAN provides tiers (like the schema we use in Mediate, described below) with controlled vocabularies (akin to markers that make up schema in Mediate, again described below), whereas the categorization in NVivo is done after annotating through a code book approach common in the social sciences. Neither tool offers, as Mediate does, automated shot detection, and the ease of querying and exporting data across projects, media, and/or schema. Furthermore, they both feature high learning curves. Mediate adopts a more streamlined approach to consuming media in the design of its interface, which echoes familiar interfaces from our historical moment.
When a user logs into the Mediate website (username: mediate_guest password: mediate2019!), they encounter the User Interface that displays their research groups. Each group includes the initials of the members along with the media assigned to the group. The media thumbnails include a count in the upper right-hand corner for annotations already generated.
Figure 1. 
User Interface as seen at login with the research group name, collaborators’ initials, and available media.
Selecting, for example, I Love Lucy, the user enters the Annotation Interface. Here they can watch the media in an interface akin to familiar streaming services, but with the addition of a vertical column of time coded annotations that scroll as the media plays.
Figure 2. 
Annotation Interface with a sample of markers generated for an episode of I Love Lucy.
Clicking on the blue marker button in the upper left-hand corner reveals the Schema Pane. Here, users select markers and set short-cuts, which enables the marking process once the user returns to the Annotation Interface. This process can take weeks, especially if a group is marking across multiple objects. The repetitive work of collaborative marking not only helps students comprehend the forms they are analyzing, but also reveals the necessary judgments involved in deciding how and when to mark. As a result, it emerges that each marker and the concepts it represents become legible as a formal construct instead of a natural given.
Figure 3. 
Schema Pane displays available markers for that schema and allows the user to assign markers to specific short-cuts for ease of marking.
At a high level of frequency across seven years and twelve classes, Armoskaite, Burges, and Mueller have observed that Mediate encourages a process of learning that slows down the rapid-fire consumption of everyday media, upending the seemingly intuitive and immediate dimensions of the audiovisual field.[2] Recursive and reflexive, digital annotation in Mediate has made our students tune into the audiovisualities that construct them as seeing and hearing subjects through a range of material forms that operate in different cultural contexts and with differing social functions. The digital annotation in Mediate align with what Liliana Melgar Estrada et al. [Melgar et al. 2017] conclude is "the most significant methodological impact" of using ELAN and NVivo: "making the analytic procedures more explicit," can generate "more self-reflection about scholarly work." The authors suggest that digital annotation's greatest strength is its reflexive ability to draw users' attention to various units of analysis that they might not otherwise notice. Similarly, Mediate allows users to slowly comprehend what makes a film or poem or composition what it is as a mediated genre unto itself, but also to grasp how this medium-specificity turns on "units of analysis" [Melgar et al. 2017] that are subjectively chosen in the first place. Just as all data are capta [Drucker 2011], the unit of analysis by which a datum is captured when digitally annotating audiovisual media is itself invented. The invented dimension of these units are revealed whenever students discuss and debate marker definitions, as we have seen in all of our classes.
The collaborative process of digital annotation enabled by Mediate, starts to address one of the concerns raised by Melgar et al. in their analysis of the current state of digital annotation: that more "collaborative" and "systematic" efforts might allow scholars to transcend "small scale" analyses easily replicated on paper [Melgar et al. 2017]. In this, they acknowledge what has long been a both celebrated and critiqued feature of the digital humanities: its problematically neoliberal stress on teamwork that we hope might be rescued as a project of collective reading and collaborative curriculum [Burges et al. 2016] [Sebok 2014]. Significant as the debate over the political economy and research efficacy of the digital humanities is [Allington et al. 2016] [Da 2019a] [Da 2019b], we nonetheless want to stress that in our courses we have found that scaling up — collectivizing and collaborating on digital annotation through groups of students producing and sharing data with one another about audiovisual media — has allowed those students to arrive at analytic findings that go beyond what they are able or willing to do otherwise.
To arrive here, we must not assume that our students are "digital natives" who are naturally better at studying and thinking with computational devices than with pen and paper. None of us believes this lazy assumption; some of us actively work against it in our classes. As we will show, we have nonetheless seen outcomes that are educationally remarkable, especially due to the collaborative learning that Mediate enables, when it comes to how digital annotation in Mediate fuels our students' grasp of a range of audiovisual media in medium-specific ways. Often such medium-specificity is tethered to the discipline-specific approaches that we use in our courses, as we chart in the next section. But something interdisciplinary has arisen across our courses too: the cross-disciplinary concept of audiovisualities that this essay advances.

Three Disciplinary Case Studies in Digital Annotation

In our courses, we position individual mediums as possessing unique material forms that exist in cultural contexts and have some social function, as is reflected in our schemas. These schemas emerge from discipline-specific frameworks, with some of us stressing material form, cultural context, or social function more when teaching with Mediate. In this section we provide three case studies. The first draws on a number of film and media studies classes where Burges wanted students to understand how a range of audiovisual media — television, poetry, and pop songs in the two cases discussed here — work formally such that they can be materially differentiated from another medium, even if they share certain properties. While Mueller and Armoskaite share this concern to varying degrees, their expertise has driven them to underscore questions of cultural context and social function more prominently in the study of audiovisual media. In his history class for music majors, Mueller asks students to interpret how a range of historical contingencies influences the creation and performance of specific musical sounds. Here, Mediate is a prompt to redirect assumptions about music that students already think they "know." Bringing together questions of material form and cultural context, Armoskaite uses Mediate to spark students to delve into how language in advertising itself is audiovisual — or more precisely, how language has a social function in commercial media that turns on how it activates the interplay of hearing and seeing vis-à-vis linguistic and discursive content meant to induce an action in someone.

Case Study 1: Material Form in Film and Media Studies (Burges)

Questions of material form are central in the film and media studies classes I teach for the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, including the two I discuss here: "The Poetics of Television" and "Introduction to Media Studies". In "The Poetics of Television", for example, we spend significant time studying the different ways in which the episode is a form of inscription that organizes the audiovisual experience of television in narratively open and closed ways. In "Introduction to Media Studies," we discuss television not only from this narrative perspective, but also from the perspective of television as a historically variable technology for transmitting sounds and images onto a screen that was, for many decades, primarily part of the TV set. These are both material to the form of television, with the latter especially providing the specific audiovisual means by which television mediates and materializes narrative, information, and advertising for its viewers. In my classes, the question of material form — of how a medium is a matter of form — is not reducible to solely inquiring into these means in order to secure that which is, to recall Clement Greenberg [Greenberg 1960], irreducibly exclusive to it. It instead involves pursuing lines of inquiry with students in which we explore the specificity of a range of media — from television and film to poetry and song — through the shifting constellations of qualities constrained and enabled by diverse audiovisual means in the first place [Doane 2007].
Digital annotation in Mediate indelibly contributes to this pursuit, especially through the schemas that provide the basis of the highly collaborative — as we will show — marking that students do over the course of a semester in classes such as "The Poetics of Television" and "Introduction to Media Studies." The schemas we have designed so far try to capture the constellations of qualities that make up any medium one might annotate in Mediate. In "The Poetics of Television," the schemas were designed around aural, visual, and narrative qualities in order to show how sound, image, and story are respectively constructed on TV.
Figure 4. 
Visual Schema.
Figure 5. 
A sample of markers generated using the Visual Schema on a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Four.
Figure 6. 
Narrative Schema.
Figure 7. 
A sample of markers generated using the Narrative Schema on a scene from Game of Thrones, Season Three.
The schemas for "Introduction to Media Studies," were designed with comparison in mind, so one focused on a set of markers for annotating poems read aloud by their authors, the other on a set of markers for annotating pop songs by individual singers and bands.
Figure 8. 
Poetry Schema.
Figure 9. 
A sample of markers and observations generated using the Poetry Schema on a video of Tracy K. Smith reading “Wade in the Water.”
Figure 10. 
Narrative Schema.
Figure 11. 
A sample of markers and observations generated using the Narrative Schema on Beyoncé's “Partition.”
Over the course of a semester, students in these two classes worked collaboratively in groups of four to six people to annotate on the basis of the schema or schemas that group was assigned, building toward long papers in which they explored a wide range of topics through distant and close readings performed in writing and through visualizations. Regardless of the topic, these papers almost universally exhibited a deep knowledge of the material form of the audiovisual medium under study; the specific interplay of sight and sound embodied by TV, for instance, became "second nature" to one student, "so much so that when I watch TV now I automatically mark the episode in the back of my mind" [Crumrine et al. 2016]. This is the result of what the students characterize as the "immersive" dimension of Mediate in which time spent marking, however "irritating" and "monotonous" and "tedious" in its slowness over the semester, generates a profound concept of the qualities that give material form to their audiovisual experience [Allen et al. 2016]. This is most palpable when one looks more closely at final projects students completed, in which their collaborative efforts yielded a remarkable level of quantitative data and qualitative observation worth understanding in greater nuance.[3]
In an essay for "The Poetics of Television" entitled "The Formal Nucleus of Television, and Its Subservience to Narrative" [Allen et al. 2016], the students argued that dialogue is a key element of the "formal nucleus" of TV by exploring the nexus of sound and story in four historically and generically variable series defined by open narration (Game of Thrones, Dark Shadows, Guiding Light, and Robotech). On the basis of hundreds of markers the students in this group annotated, they argue that dialogue is an elementally generative feature of the "aural design" of television that "advance[s] the narrative progression of an episode." This is due to dialogue allowing "all details pertinent to the comprehension of the narrative, in terms of both plot and character, to be enumerated in explicit, unequivocal, and economical terms." This group further contends that the television camera often obeys the human voice, suggesting that visual design flows from aural design, for instance, on the basis of the 54 on-offscreen and off-onscreen shifts of sound vis-à-vis the image and diegesis that the group marked in the infamous Red Wedding scene of Game of Thrones while annotating in the Aural Schema. While both the visible and the audible are subservient to narrative in the argument this group's paper makes, it nonetheless richly charts the interplay of sight and sound within storytelling on TV, revealing how that mediated interplay — that audiovisuality — lets narrative take material form on screen.
"Introduction to Media Studies" similarly attuned students to material form. But rather than focusing on one audiovisual medium to achieve this end, as in "The Poetics of Television," I used a comparative approach in which I asked students to work in groups to annotate poetry and pop songs to which they listened closely and repeatedly in Mediate. Students were not allowed to pull print versions of the poems they were annotating on the basis of oral renditions by their authors, forcing them to use their ears to grasp the differences between poems and songs marked using schemas developed for each of these genres. What one group observed about those differences will sound obvious: while rhythmically structured and lineated language is the medium of poetry, pop songs are much more musical in their means, depending on instrumentation, chord progression, beat groupings and so on [Colberg et al. 2019].
But what is less obvious is how the students in this group came to experience this difference because Mediate introduced annotation into audition. In annotating, they heard what was material to the form of poetry and pop songs as a fixed and motivated structure of aural notation. The songs went from being an internal experience of sound and music to appearing as an externalized — because now annotated — form of audiovisual inscription. Thus the long paper this group produced focused less on material form in favor of trying to pinpoint what constellation of audible qualities inscribe what they call "intensity." For this group, intensity refers to how "affective response" and "aesthetic emotion" in a mediated genre of sound turns upon medium-specific features, as in their LP record player-inspired visualizations of two songs, Troye Sivan's "Wild" and Taylor Swift's "This Love." Audiovisualities in their own right, these experimental data visualizations show how distinct kinds of vocal stress, chord changes, back-up singing, and instrumentation not only mark the form of these songs, but also form the possibility of having a musically "intense" reaction to them as well.
Figure 12. 
Experimental Visualization of Formal and Intensity Markings for Troye Sivan’s "Wild."
Figure 13. 
Experimental Visualization of Formal and Intensity Markings for Taylor Swift’s "This Love."
In classes such as "The Poetics of Television" and "Introduction to Media Studies," digital annotation in Mediate enables students to work together to see and hear the material form of a range of audiovisual media. It is important that they are working together, collaborating to annotate such that both within and across their groups they are able to explore audiovisuality in a collective way that has both quantitative and qualitative effects. On the one hand, the quantitative dimension of their collaborative efforts is visible in the plenitude of markers that each group generates as a working collective, and in how they draw on the audiovisual data produced by other groups marking in the same class to understand the annotation that has occurred in a given group. On the other hand, the repeated marking required to yield thousands of data points they can share with one another engenders a quality of description and interpretation that shows how close they understand the material forms of film, television, poetry, and pop songs from multiple audiovisual angles of seeing and hearing. As we have more fully argued elsewhere [Burges et al. 2016], however, that "truth" depends upon the discussions that often emerge over how to collectively define and collaboratively mark a unit of analysis within and across groups as they annotate features of material form; these discussions over how to see and hear, though, only further shore up both that no medium is a natural given, and that every audiovisual experience is mediated.

Case Study 2: The Cultural Contexts of Music History (Mueller)

Although connected institutionally, Eastman School of Music (ESM) is quite different from the rest of the university in terms of its student population, educational goals, and curriculum. All of ESM's approximately 500 undergraduate students are music majors, with a primary focus on Western classical music.[4] Our students are some of the best young musicians in the world, meaning that most view their classroom activities through the lens of their future careers in performance, composition, and pedagogy. To even gain admittance, they need to have remarkable expertise and years of specialized training in a tradition built around individual composers and master performers. So, while these students bring a strong passion for music into the classroom, doing academic work often forces them to confront viewpoints and approaches that are frequently taken as natural rather than culturally constructed.
Most of the traditions represented at ESM are heavily reliant on musical notation, a highly advanced system of written symbols that has, over many centuries, enabled the development and circulation of music that originated in Western Europe. In many respects, the very presence of notation constitutes the tradition [Taruskin 2005]. Musical notation can also be understood as a form of audiovisual inscription that communicates specific information about both how to perform music and also how an individual piece functions melodically, harmonically, rhythmically, and formally [Moseley 2015] [Rehding et al. 2017] [Kittler 1999]. Reading music, as we would say, is a presumed skill that students rely upon as they move through the robust series of classes in music theory and history, both of which differently emphasize score-based analysis of internal (within a piece) and external (within a tradition) musical features. As a result, students are very comfortable working with written music, as well as the specialized language used to describe it. Still, the culture surrounding classical music has calcified certain perspectives, especially on what it means to do analysis. For many students, music analysis is too often conceived of as an action solely in visual terms, rather than an act that takes place in a far more expanded audiovisual realm.
In Fall 2019, I introduced Mediate into my "Experiments at the Edges of 20th Century Music," a required course within the undergraduate music history core. My goal was to foreground listening, rather than reading, as the primary means of analysis. As exceptional performers already, my students listen with an expertly attuned understanding of musical performance. But while they continually analyze music while listening, they do not always listen historically — that is, attend to how specific musical moments express historically contingent beliefs about culture, society, or the many processes of music making. There is no inherent problem with their modality of listening. However, it is not always congruous with my major pedagogical goal: to examine and interpret how music and its written tradition are both heavily mediated creations, dependent on historically situated actors with different investments and values. By asking students to pay attention differently, Mediate not only foregrounds listening but also asks students to translate that listening into specific observations represented visually. In effect, this reverses the standard audiovisual direction of music making. Rather than move from visual inscription (notation) to aural expression (performance), Mediate renders what is heard into specific visual markings of that performance. Unsettling the assumed relationships between the visual and the aural — by putting listening first — encourages alternative viewpoints to come into the forefront of the analytical process.
Inspired by previous uses of Mediate in the classroom, I had students complete a semester-long collective analysis project. Our work began before I introduced the Mediate platform by continually asking students during class discussions and daily responses to listen through a series of five interrelated questions oriented towards cultural contexts:
  1. Who or what shaped this particular music or performance?
  2. What would it be like to perform this music?
  3. What are the musical materials used in the creation of this piece?
  4. How does this musical material transform?
  5. What do you think the creators were trying to say or accomplish with this music?[5]
For their Mediate project, students organized into groups of two to four. Each student within those groups picked one or more of these questions and marked up their audio in Mediate from those perspectives. I developed specific markers for each question to aid in this process, but also encouraged students to develop others to meet their specific needs.
Figure 14. 
Categories of Analysis Schema.
As they listened, students would mark everything from the seemingly obvious — what they might otherwise notice without thinking — to those details obscured by the rapid unfolding of any time-based art. After creating several hundred markers, each group began to decipher their efforts and develop a thesis for their written analysis with the same five questions again providing a road map. The class went through this process in two different iterations. First, all groups analyzed the first movement of William Grant Still's Symphony No. 1. Then, each group picked a piece of music or specific performance from a given list of artists and composers.
Figure 15. 
A sample of markers and observations generated using the Categories of Analysis Schema on Ida Handel performing Part One of the Carmen Fantasy.
Two general observations emerged out of the individual reflections written at the end of the semester. First, the slow, sometimes-tedious markup process requires active listening. Many students discussed how they came to notice subtle details and complexities precisely because the marking up process made "passive" or "casual" listening impossible. The intensity involved with repeated listening did not always change their initial opinions, but rather increased the precision and specificity of their observations. One student remarked with surprise about "how much could happen within one tiny second." Second, the processes of collective listening encouraged individuals to consider multiple vantage points. Collaboration through group work is not always smooth or easy, and it is sometimes unpopular. But by learning from or being challenged by their colleagues — perhaps even by becoming a "cultural context" in miniature — many students reported that the dialogic experience enabled them to make connections that were perhaps not obvious to them before.
The written work of each group also proved how valuable doing analysis away from the score could be. Many groups wrote about meaningful moments that would have otherwise remained hidden by only looking at the written notation — the particular use of vibrato, the background noise in a recording, a reoccurring timbre, or the use of space or a particular texture in the orchestration. Through the analysis of seemingly discrete details in relation to the background of the composer or other cultural influences, students then found ways to relate what happens musically to what that performance might mean more broadly, which is to say historically. As one student commented, the analysis provided a way to understand how music functioned as an interconnected web of historical events, musical influences, and experiences of "real life people." In comparison with previous semesters, the written work of the students in this class was at once more precise and bolder in their conclusions.
The slow and collective process of listening through Mediate allows students to re-situate their otherwise expert ears towards music as a form of audiovisual inscription. Music is a time-based art that exists in performance, yet it nevertheless remains heavily dependent on the visual realm. The specialized language used in traditional forms of analysis — a Neapolitan sixth chord, for one example — describes both what music sounds and looks like. As a digital platform that creates a method for analysis, Mediate makes the audiovisualities of music clear. Musical culture is and has always been an audiovisual culture as well, and new possibilities surface for students about this fact when they experience music through Mediate.

Case Study 3: Social Function in Linguistics (Armoskaite)

The Department of Linguistics in the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, while a part of the social sciences, is a hub of interdisciplinary research with ties to other departments, including Music (with a focus on perception and production of sounds), Brain and Cognitive Science (with a focus on meaning and language processing), Anthropology (with focus on culture and language intersections), and Psychology (with a focus of child language acquisition). As a field, linguistics covers a vast number of topics and methodologies, hence it is impossible to provide a general description that would fit the range. For the purposes of this case study, it will suffice to state (i) that linguistics focuses on of the makeup of grammar, which is a set of sub-systems of sound, form and meaning; (ii) and that these subsystems are used for communication, a function that interacts with social conventions and societal values, a.o. [Fasold and Connor-Linton 2014].
My course "Language and Advertising," requires students to consider language use in the context of audiovisual marketing against the backdrop of current social trends. While Linguistics does not have a Business or Marketing track, the course routinely is taken by business majors and consistently is a popular elective among other non-Linguistics majors. I face a diverse group of students with different backgrounds, skills, and assumptions, though united by the three common denominators. First, the ubiquity of advertising in their lives gives them a false sense of familiarity and assumed knowledge of the medium; second, they want to learn the nuts and bolts of the advertising machine; and third, they possess limited knowledge of linguistics. Over the course of the semester, they learn that the social function of language in advertising is to manipulate, with commercial media, working to apply psychological pressure through a mode of audiovisuality that depends on influencing our emotions and circumventing our rational mind, a.o. [Sedivy and Carlson 2011] [Lewis 2013] [Poels and Dewitte 2006].
Situating a familiar medium — advertising — within a likely unfamiliar field — linguistics — necessarily slows down the students. They learn to analyze the linguistic components that, to call back to the film and media studies case above, "make" the medium. The material form that interests a linguist, however, includes not only sounds and images of the kind that interest Burges and Mueller in their courses, but also the very structure of language as humans speak, read, and hear it. For example, each of the following posters can be deciphered in the linguistic terms of sound, form, and meaning, which shows that even print advertising functions as an audiovisual medium.
The American Red Cross "Missing Types" campaign (2018) presents a sound-based puzzle for the viewer to acoustically fill in, whether in silence or out loud: all the missing elements are vowels. The viewer goes in search of those vowels, enjoying a language game that depends on visual absence engendering audio presence. And because the vowels are associated with types of blood, this audiovisual play becomes a linguistic mechanism for soliciting blood donations.
The Snickers "Satisfectellent" (TBWA 2007) advertisement plays upon another element of grammar, namely, derivation of words. In this case, a word that is possible, but does not exist, is created. The novelty of the coined word is the striking — and strikingly audiovisual — feature of the advertisement: the joy of recognition of the brand of the snack is fused with the unexpectedness of the word.
Finally, the Greenpeace "Straws Suck: Gull" (Rethink 2018) advertisement exploits the shades of meaning of the verb "to suck." The painful visual is certainly not the first association we have about sucking through straws, which we may think about in sonic and/or tactile terms primarily. But the unexpected visual connotation is meant to shock us into changing our habits of consumption.
However, language in print advertising engenders audiovisual experience in a far more static way than the advertising that flows across our many screens as moving images and dynamic sounds. The latter contains hundreds of speech patterns in addition to innumerable cues for our ears and eyes. Superimposed on moving images, these patterns and cues come at a viewer at a speed that barely allows them to register the component parts, let alone perform a thorough analysis. Mediate creates a space for such analysis external to the ephemerally immediate modes in which we normally consume commercial media. In so doing, it makes legible that language plays a constitutive part in the interplay of sight and hearing — that all three of these human abilities contribute to the social function of manipulation that is the raison d'etre of often brilliant acts of commodified audiovisuality that want us to buy or buy into something. Mediate gets students to treat the audiovisuality of advertising as a constellation of elements variously linguistic, optical, and aural — as an object of analysis.
This takes time over the course of the semester. In "Language and Advertising" (Fall 2018 and Fall 2019), I spent three weeks teaching students the fundamentals of linguistics using similar examples to the print advertisements discussed above. Building on this print unit, we then turned to the challenge of analyzing commercials using Mediate. The students began by analyzing an ad without the use of Mediate. Then I modeled the slow and detailed analysis conducted through Mediate by providing them with samples of my own marked-up commercial. We discussed their observations, along with my own, which gently lets them understand how many details they've missed in their own observations. The students were then trained on the platform and introduced to the schema over two class sessions. After that initial introduction, the students took charge of their own learning with only a light editorial supervision.
Circumventing the top-down didacticism of the traditional lecture, Mediate allowed the students to immerse themselves into the material on their own. Working in groups, they were tasked with selecting and analyzing at least two video ads, splitting up the work of marking (what we call "coding" in the field of linguistics) amongst themselves. Rather than a traditional linguistic analysis of a video ad that might include a transcription of the text divorced from the audio and visual cues, Mediate facilitated a holistic approach to the interplay and interdependencies of the audiovisualities commercial media employ.
Figure 16. 
A sample of markers and observations generated using the Linguistics Schema on Cadillac's "The Future is Here" 60 second spot.
In slowing down their observations, they are forced to think about each element in the totality of the advertisement such that it emerges as a linguistic object of audiovisual analysis, with the manipulative properties of this object becoming ever clearer as its social function over the time they spend in Mediate. As one student noted, "there is no escape but to analyze." At the end of the semester, the groups presented their analyses of commercial media, with the entire class responding. This collective response included debates over how each group defined certain linguistic, audio, and visual units of analysis, and about the conclusions about manipulation in commercial media that each group reached. These discussions — aided by the carefully coded examples in Mediate — were paramount in helping students build an applied understanding of the social function of advertising from an audiovisual angle grounded in linguistics as an interdisciplinary field.
Despite their engagement and increased capacity with audiovisual analysis through Mediate, there still is room for greater interdisciplinary collaboration in "Language and Advertising", especially in light of the cross-disciplinary sense of audiovisuality we are advancing in this article. In my course, I welcome film experts as occasional invited speakers. But through my discussions with Burges and Mueller, I have realized that more sophisticated ways of tuning into the linguistic, visual, and sonic patterns would offer further opportunities to explore the range and means of consumer manipulation. For example, thus far, I have left out musical aspects completely as I lack relevant training. In the future iterations of this course, I think about the potential for more nuanced analysis if I could harness Mueller's expertise in helping students define the auditory components, if Burges could work with students to delve further into the visual form — that is, if students benefitted not only from their collective defining through marking, but also the collective expertise of a more intentionally cross-disciplinary approach to teaching and research.

Audiovisualities out of Annotation

Across our individual classes, we have seen our students more fully enter the study of audiovisual media as they are defined by material form, cultural context, and social function within our respective disciplinary frameworks. In sharing these experiences with one another across our disciplines, we have been reminded that, when it comes to the audiovisual field, a film and media studies scholar should sometimes see and hear that field like a music historian who should sometimes see and hear it like a linguist. In noticing that we should see and hear like each other more, even as we explored medium-specific matters with our students, we have arrived at the cross-disciplinary concept of audiovisualities. Pedagogically and intellectually segregated from another due to the division of labor that organizes the modern research university, this concept allows us to think about the interplay of sight and sound more promiscuously and productively, overcoming the binaries that too often divide the audible and the visual and the divides that splinter disciplines from one another institutionally. In working together the last few years on digital annotation, we have learned to think more comprehensively across our respective fields about the (re)mediated sites where the physical and cultural operations of audiovisual experience converge. It is these locations of convergence that construct not only sensory and social subjectivities grounded in seeing and hearing, but also material forms and collective technics that set the conditions of possibility to see and hear to begin with — in short, that construct a manifold of audiovisualities. Our work on Mediate has helped us to estrange, even to alienate, the "natural order" that has been imposed on our experience of that manifold, or what Michel Chion describes as the "audiovisual contract" [Chion 1994, 9].
As this gesture to Chion telegraphs, we are not the first group of scholars to explore such conditions. The cross-disciplinary concept of audiovisualities on which we have landed already has a genealogy of thinkers — many of them cited at the outset of this essay — associated with visual studies and sound studies, not to mention film and media studies, behind it. Indebted to them, we nonetheless think the practice of digital annotation that Mediate provides contributes a collaborative model of learning through collective reading that allows our students to conceptualize audiovisualities beyond their individual selves (and our individual disciplines). It may do this, as well, for any scholars that take it up, especially, if not only in a collective and collaborative form. The collectivity of digital annotation can take that which feels intuitive and internal and remake it as unfamiliar and external; the collective act of exteriorizing that occurs in Mediate brings a new awareness to the qualities and characteristics of a given audiovisual medium.
"History is nothing but exteriorities," writes Jonathan Sterne in The Audible Past, by which he means that we can only know the "sonic world" of the past through its "efforts, expressions, and reactions" [Sterne 2003]. Mediate embraces this point of view. Digital annotation in Mediate asks students to exteriorize their reactions to audiovisual media not only by slowing down their consumption of them, but also by turning what feels subjectively intuitive, immediate, and internal (listening to and even playing music, taking in a poem, consuming an advertisement, watching a TV show) into a mediated object to be analyzed collaboratively and collectively beyond oneself. Vivid examples of this process of exteriorizing abound in our case studies. In "Experiments at the Edges of 20th Century Music," students produce digital "notations," so to speak, through their use of Mediate, thus resituating the ocularcentric primacy of musical notation through careful listening and historicizing. Similarly, in "Language and Advertising," the interface renders commercials a constellation of elements that act on us linguistically, visually, and musically in ways students can tangibly analyze. And the experimental visualizations of two pop songs for "Introduction to Media Studies" draw on data produced collectively through digital annotation about the aural experience of intensity to visually represent the material form of that intensity.
Mediate therefore enables a defamiliarized perception of audiovisialities, first and foremost, by challenging the consumption of media as an individual and discrete act atomized from others. The work of collaborative annotation, which sets Mediate apart from platforms such as ELAN and NVivo, reveals not only the potential for different experiences of the same mediums, but that the criteria through which we name and identify media — and indeed, our respective disciplines — can, and perhaps should, be subject to the scrutiny made possible by collective re-examination. Our respective fields are built upon often now unspoken agreements about what constitutes film or poetry or music or television or advertising or language. Mediate shows how "agreeing to disagree" on a given medium's properties remains a necessary move within and across disciplines, especially if we are to take into account critiques of both collaboration and computation leveled at the digital humanities. The reverse of the earlier claim, in other words, is also true. Our students often debate what a unit analysis means when marking, mobilizing the differences amongst themselves in collaborating on digital annotation. Similarly, when it comes to the cross-disciplinary concept of audiovisualities, a film and media studies scholar should see and hear the interplay of sight unlike a music historian who should sometimes see and hear it unlike a linguist as much as we should see and hear it like each other.
The case studies recounted in this article reflect this collaborative process of disagreement — the self-aware reflection upon "units of analysis" — as a pedagogically necessary exercise in understanding the audiovisual world we inhabit in the present. However, such a practice is not limited to the undergraduate classroom alone. The collaborative nature of digital annotation breaks down a process that scholars, at all levels, often take for granted: the terms and tools through which we analyze media, especially within our respective fields. By making us be both like and unlike each other, Mediate has allowed us to take hold of those terms and tools anew, discovering audiovisualities out of annotation as a concept that unsettles what we do with the interplay of sight and sound inscribed everywhere into experience at present.

Notes

[1] A 2019 University of Rochester Educational IT Innovation Grant supported the teaching described in and the writing of this article.
[2] Enrollments for courses at University of Rochester using Mediate are as follows: "Poetics of Television" (Joel Burges) 2012 (27 students), 2013 (28 students), 2016 (58 students); "Film History 1989-Present" (Joel Burges) 2014 (29 students); "Introduction to Media Studies" (Joel Burges) 2019 (67 students); "Clocks and Computers" (Joel Burges) 2013 (20 students), 2015 (8 students); "Recording 20th Century Music" (Darren Mueller) 2018 (8 students); "Experiments at the Edges of 20th Century Music" (Darren Mueller) 2019 (29 students); "Language and Advertising" (Solveiga Armoskaite) 2018 (48 students), and 2019 (35 students); "Signature Hitchcock/Hitchcock's Signature" (James Rosenow) 2020 (24 students); "Tourist Japan" (Joanne Bernardi) 2020 (4 students); "Unwept: Women and Silent film" (Clara Auclair) 2020 (3 students); "Student Teaching Secondary School Science" (April Luehmann) 2020 (9 students).
[3] We believe it is important not only to include these specifics, but also to attribute the papers to the students themselves. Moreover, as needed, we obtained permission from various students in the groups cited from "The Poetics of Television" and "Introduction to Media Studies" to share their work; in the latter, we conducted focus groups where students also signed off on us sharing their feedback and ideas. The comments from students in "Experiments at the Edges of 20th Century Music" and "Linguistics and Advertising," however, have remained anonymous since we had less of this infrastructure in place.
[4] At the undergraduate level, ESM also offers robust degree programs in jazz performance and jazz composition. Graduate degree tracks include music leadership, conducting, early music, film composition, opera, music theory, ethnomusicology, and musicology.
[5] I adapted these questions from composer David Kirkland Garner (University of South Carolina).

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