Losers and Finders: Indexing Audio-Visual Digital Media

The contemporary burgeoning usage of digital movies, photos, audio and text, their distribution through networks both electronic and physical will be considered in the context of a convergence of these media with a popular interest in personal and community history and identity. The paper introduces interdisciplinary research into human memory as a context for understanding its relation to machine memory and methods of storing and retrieval. It proposes an approach to indexing audio-visual media utilising a time-space representational system, drawing upon a real-world time-space representation as the taxonomy of the indexing procedure. An interactive experimental prototype, PathScape, will be described and evaluated and further practice-based research approaches to author-defined storage and retrieval systems will be outlined