JISC10 Conference Keynotes with Twitter Subtitles

Last week saw he return of the JISC conference. As with other similar events the organisers explored a number of ways to allow delegates to experience the conference virtually as well in person. The main avenues were video streaming some of the sessions live across the web; the inclusion of a Ning social network (I’m guessing they won’t be doing this again next year. See Mashable’s Ning: Failures, Lessons and Six Alternatives); and advertising the #jisc10 hashtag for use on twitter, blogs etc. I would recommend Brian Kelly’s Privatisation and Centralisation Themes at JISC 10 Conference post which presents some analysis and discussion on the effectiveness of each of these channels.
It is apparent that the JISC conference mirrors a wider emerging trend to allow dispersed audiences to view, comment and contribute to live events. A recent example is that of the #leadersdebate broadcast on ITV, which as well as having over 9.7 million views generated over 184,000 tweets (from tweetminster.com) and numerous other real-time comments on blogs and other social network sites.
I didn’t have a chance to attend the conference myself and other things meant I was unable to see the live video streams, although I was able to keep an eye on the twitter stream. Fortunately the conference organisers have made thevideos of the keynote speeches by Martin Bean and Bill St. Arnaud available. It is however difficult to replay the video with the real-time backchannel discussion. Cue the twitter subtitle generator, which I’ve been exploring through various posts. So if you would like to experience the live video/twitter experience some I’ve embedded the videos below.
Opening Keynote: Martin Bean, Vice Chancellor, The Open University

Subtitle content provided by | Download the XML subtitle file

Closing Keynote: Bill St. Arnaud, P. Eng. President, St. Arnaud-Walker and Associates Inc.

Subtitle content provided by | Download the XML subtitle file

Here are Martin Bean’s and Bill St. Arnaud’s biographies and keynote slides. Both of the video’s were produced by JISC and distributed under Creative Commons.
Just a quick couple of words on the subtitle file generation. I had planned to use the archive of tweets provided by Twapper Keeper for both keynotes, but there was a 45 minute hole in the archive between 08:44 and 09:27GMT for the first session, which is being investigated, so I used the Twitter Search instead. As the session was early in the morning and twitter limits searches to 1500 tweets I had to modify the query to ‘#jisc10 -RT’, which removes retweets, to get results for all of Martin Bean’s presentation (he still has a healthy 372 original tweets during the course of his presentation. [There is perhaps an interesting way to visualise RT’s in the subtitle file to indicate consensus tweets – for another day]
If you are planning to run your own event and would like to create a twitter video archive here are some basic tips:

1. Make sure you advertise a hashtag for your event
2. Before the event create a hashtag notebook on twitter archive service Twapper Keeper – there are other archive services but currently the subtitle tool only integrates with this one
3. Make sure video is captured in a reusable format. The video above is played back with the JW Flash Video Player which supports FLV, H.264/MPEG-4, MP3 and YouTube Videos. Generated subtitle files can also be used directly in YouTube (if you own the video). I’ve also experimented with Vimeo for longer videos.

If you would also like a ‘at the scene’ report of the keynotes and some of the plenary sessions you should read this post by my colleague Lis Parcell at RSC Wales – Technology at the heart of education and research: JISC10 conference report

var so = new SWFObject(‘/mashe/ititle/player/player.swf’,’ply’,’470′,’320′,’9′,’#ffffff’); so.addParam(‘allowfullscreen’,’true’); so.addParam(‘allowscriptaccess’,’always’); so.addParam(‘wmode’,’opaque’); so.addVariable(‘file’,’http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/avfiles/events/2010/04/martin_bean.flv’); so.addVariable(‘plugins’, ‘/mashe/ititle/player/captions.swf’); so.addVariable(‘captions.file’, ‘/mashe/ititle/xml/jisc10bean.xml’); so.write(‘mediaspace1’); so.addVariable(‘file’,’http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/avfiles/events/2010/04/bill_starnaud.flv’); so.addVariable(‘plugins’, ‘/mashe/ititle/player/captions.swf’); so.addVariable(‘captions.file’, ‘/mashe/ititle/xml/jisc10starnaud.xml’); so.write(‘mediaspace2’);