This panel will present a comprehensive update of The Media Ecology Project (MEP), including details on the progress made in relation to two advanced NEH grants that focus on very different subject matter: very early cinema ("Understanding Visual Culture Through Silent Film Collections") and 1950s-1970s television civil rights newsfilm (“The Accessible Civil Rights Heritage [ACRH] Project”). The panel will focus on the development of The Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT), which enables new capacities to create time-based annotations that enhance search and discovery across participating archives. We will report on innovations in gathering and organizing archival materials and metadata across multiple archives; innovations in the development and coordination of machine reading and machine vision tools; the development of new research to enable access of moving image culture for blind and low-vision users; and the development of capacities for output from The Semantic Annotation Tool into the Scalar digital publishing platform.
