Discussion: Should the Music Captioning team's "projects" be kept or scrapped?

[calmansi]

Dear Music Captioners,

Amara teams' "projects" used to at least have a description, but recently, they have been demoted to mere categories: see Teams: project descriptions don't show anymore http://support.universalsubtitles.org/categories/6573/forums/28027/topics/9378 in the Amara help forum.

So shall we keep the Music Captioning team so-called projects or scrap them? It'd be simpler and more flexible to just add tags similar to the present projects' names in the http://groups.google.com/group/musiccaptioning back-up group, actually.

For reference, here is the list of Music Captioning team projects with their now deleted descriptions (well, still visible in the team's dashboard to admins, but to nobody else):

• Singing in Signs - http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/teams/musiccaptioning/?project=singing-in-signs:
  "This projects gathers videos that are sung in a sign language, or more often, both in a sign language and in a spoken language. They are both interesting per se and for the subtitling choices and solutions they can foster."
• Seeing Music - http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/teams/musiccaptioning/?project=seeing-music:
  "Block captions and subtitles only apply to sung music, and only give a very rough visual equivalent of what is happening sound-wise. However there are very creative attempts to create such equivalents:
  - many cartoons are music-based, particularly among the earlier ones: the http://www.youtube.com/user/CCCartoons channel is an invaluable resource for those. As its videos are already captioned - and often subtitled in other languages, only a few examples have been added to this team.
  - the long-standing reflection about correspondences between senses has been actuated, particularly in the present digital times, in visualizations of music;
  - karaoke-like or dynamic captioning can better capture the dynamics of a song than block captions: for more of those, see the http://www.youtube.com/user/zwgm "Same Language Subtitling" and http://www.youtube.com/user/planetread channels.
  These dynamic captions can be translated in CC (closed captioning) with Amara: the result is a bit text-heavy, but then CC can be switched off. "
• On and Around Music - http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/teams/musiccaptioning/?project=on-and-around-music:
  "Interviews and discussions on music and somehow related topics."
• Other Music Videos -
  "Having projects in a team means that further videos added to the team have to be assigned to a project. So if you want to add a video that doesn't fit any of the other projects, use this one, please.
  Thanks to Amber Sylvia Worsley for her suggestion to rename this project (formerly titled "unclassified videos")."
  
• Team's wiki - http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/teams/musiccaptioning/?project=teams-wiki-please-dont-add-videos-to-this-project:
  "(Please don't add videos to this "project")
  Music Captioning also has a wiki, http://musiccaptioning.wikispaces.com/ . It initially had a page for each new video added to the Amara Music Captioning Team. The idea is that wikispaces pages can be tagged, which also allows browsing via a tag cloud. Moreover, each page has a discussion sub page where live links can be posted - whereas this is not possible in Amara comments. And sometimes it can be many to be able to do that.
  However, so many videos have been added to the team of late that the wiki seriously needs updating. If you wish to help with that, or if you have other ideas for its use,  please join the wiki (the "join" link is top right)."
  [Well, this project certainly does not make any sense without its description, so I'd really like to delete it]
• MusicEnglish - http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/teams/musiccaptioning/?project=music-english:
  "MusicEnglish - http://musicenglish.co.uk/ - is a free and non-for-profit website, helping to make the words and music of popular songs more accessible globally through subtitling (captioning) in English and many other languages."

Claude Almansi

(one of the Music Captioning team's admins)

(message also sent to the Music Captioning team's participants via Amara).

[Richard Gresswell]

Dear Music Captioners

Firstly thank you for the opportunity to discuss this important point. There is a need to address the way the Music Captioning team content is curated as a whole. 

There are creative options and I want to propose one here and ask for your opinion. 

Some of you may be familiar with www.mirocommunity.org which is part of Pculture. They offer an ideal video curation platform which enables users to submit video links / embed code to one place. Equally the added videos can be tagged and categorised. With such a platform we would be able to curate all the Amara music captioned videos in one site with easy navigation using tag widgets e.g. by Artist. Members could register for the site and submit all their videos. We could also have widgets for top contributers, most popular videos etc. All video submits would be moderated.

I would be extremely happy to build, develop and administer such a site using the Mirocommunity platform for and on behalf of Amara. As far as I can see everyone is a winner (including Pculture) and it would be such an effective way to share all our hard work as captioners! I would need help from volunteer moderators though :)

Here is a link to a website that is using the Mirocommunity platform, (so you can see how videos can be submitted and displayed etc). http://ondemand.duke.edu/

There is  one big snag though to all this - I need Pculture / Mirocommunity to host this site free of charge because I don't have the time to invest in learning how to programme with Python and using Django etc to host myself (although I would love to) - so a polite request, can we have FREE hosting PLEASE where we can customise and use templates. Because it will need to look and work just great :) 

Let me know what you all think to this idea. 

Best wishes

Richard Gresswell

---

From: calmansi <claude....@gmail.com>
To: musicca...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, 10 December 2012, 0:39
Subject: [musiccaptioning group] Discussion: Should the Music Captioning team's "projects" be kept or scrapped?

--
See also the Amara Music Captioning team: http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/teams/musiccaptioning/
---
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Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/musiccaptioning?hl=en.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/musiccaptioning/-/1-JxWamH9cIJ.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

[Claude Almansi]

Thanks for your reply, Richard.

http://www.mirocommunity.org/pricing/ describes a for free option with
500 videos and 1 admin. I'd be tempted to try one to see if the Amara
embedding works correctly there, because that's of essence for Music
Captioning, where we caption other people's videos, and the FAQs for
the Miro Communities -
http://support.mirocommunity.org/solution/categories/13505/folders/25351
- don't mention embedding the Amara player.

Maybe you could try one too for MusicEnglish?

Another thing to check is how Miro Communities look on a smartphone. I
only have an old cell phone that doesn't go on the internet, but when
I tried the emulation of various layouts with Web Developer for the
Duke community, the "Mobile portrait (320x480)" layout seemed rather
awkward to use,

So let's try one or two for-free Miro community and see how these
aspects work there, do you agree?

Best,

Claude

[Richard Gresswell]

Hi Claude, all

Thanks for the response - I have had a go already but because it is the free option I can't really imagine what it will look like with new skins etc but anyway here is the link to my trial - it is very easy to use and you can have thumbnail images etc 

www.musicenglish.mirocommunity.org

Of course this new idea will not have anything to do with my MusicEnglish site.

Best wishes

Richard

---

From: Claude Almansi <claude....@gmail.com>
To: musicca...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, 10 December 2012, 14:02
Subject: Re: [musiccaptioning group] Discussion: Should the Music Captioning team's "projects" be kept or scrapped?

--
See also the Amara Music Captioning team: http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/teams/musiccaptioning/
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You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MusicCaptioning" group.
To post to this group, send email to musicca...@googlegroups.com.

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to musiccaptioning+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/musiccaptioning?hl=en.

[Claude Almansi]

Thanks, Richard:

Your Miro community home page is less crowded than Duke's,
fortunately: very nice. Other plusses: the Amara embed works, and the
video pages can be tagged. One minus: the description of the original
video does not survive the double embed (in Amara, then in Miro).

What about automatically adding videos, say from a YouTube channel or
playlist (as one can on Amara)... or from an Amara team, or the videos
an Amara user has collaborated to or added? There are RSS feeds for
the latter two: they're already active in the users' profiles in the
staging/preview version of Amara: see e.g.
http://staging.universalsubtitles.org/en/profiles/profile/jules.rincon/
and http://staging.universalsubtitles.org/en/profiles/videos/jules.rincon/
.

Maybe we could ask on the Amara help forum? The Miro Community help
has not implemented forums, apparently.

Best,

Claude

[Richard Gresswell]

Hi Claude

Great suggestions - could you explain how to add from Amara and Youtube playlist, I've no idea how to do that - would save a lot of time :) Descriptions could be cut and pasted I suppose but maybe too time consuming. 

Best wishes

Richard

---

From: Claude Almansi <claude....@gmail.com>
To: musicca...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Monday, 10 December 2012, 17:32

Subject: Re: [musiccaptioning group] Discussion: Should the Music Captioning team's "projects" be kept or scrapped?

[Claude Almansi]

Uh ho. When I applied to join your MusicEnglish Miro community,
Richard, a) the account activation e-mail ended in the spam bin of my
gmail account, with a banner saying:
"Why is this message in Spam? We've found that lots of messages from
mirocommunity.org are spam. Learn more
<http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=1366858&expand=5>;
b) the activation procedure didn't work. : my account is in a kind of limbo.
A bit worrying.

Best,

Claude

[Claude Almansi]

Hi Richard,

I was just wondering if it were possible to add to Miro communities
from Amara and Youtube playlists, I don't know if it is, sorry. That's
why I suggested asking on the Amara help forum.

Best,

Claude