Step 1: Selecting Your Audiovisual Item and Planning the Lesson

Step 2: Setting up Your Classroom Project and Adding Your Audiovisual Item

Step 3: Creating and Uploading Annotations

---

Step 1: Selecting Your Audiovisual Item and Planning the Lesson

• AudiAnnotate supports direct links to audio or video (the url will typically end in .mp3 or .mp4). You can also use audio or video uploaded to Internet Archive (with a direct link) and audio hosted on the cloud software Wasabi. Spokenweb audio also works!
• Be mindful of the media you choose and the audience it will have (both in the classroom and online). Add a content warning if appropriate, provide a summary, and provide context.
• Think about questions and discussions you might prompt in order to scaffold critical thinking and understanding of the chosen media.
• Things you may want to consider:
  • The presence of sensitive or disturbing content
  • Inclusion of a content warning
  • Appropriate context
  • Scaffolding lesson in a way that doesn’t overwhelm student/teacher with understanding audio, annotations, and using the application
  • Virtual, hybrid, or in person lesson/activities
  • Group vs. individual work

Step 2: Setting up Your Classroom Project and Adding Your Audiovisual Item(s)

The AudiAnnotate application uses GitHub to access data and build project repositories. It does not store data, but rather, allows you to interact easily with data in GitHub through our application interface. To do this, AA creates a IIIF manifest that is stored in GitHub. This manifest includes the information you will provide when you build your project, upload a URL to an audiovisual item and associated metadata, and add annotation layers.

Each project contains items. These items can present an audio or visual item (select “Create Item Manifest”) or only text (select “New Page”). Before you create a project, you’ll want to consider whether you want to share your project with the students for them to upload their annotations themselves, or whether you’ll manage uploading annotations without student invovlement.

To create a project, follow the instructions in our documentation.

Step 3: Creating and Uploading Annotations

Our classroom resources below use scaffolded questions and activities to walk students through the process of thinking critically and analyzing audiovisual media:

• An Introduction to Annotating and Presenting Sensitive Audio Using AudiAnnotate
• Example Sensitive Audio Lesson: John Beecher, McComb “Criminal Syndicalism” Case

Annotations for AudiAnnotate need to be formatted in seconds and organized by columns.

• Our formatted google sheet is a great resource to share with your students.
• Annotations can be easily created in Google Sheets or Excel. Students can work in groups or individually, then download the file as a .tsv, .csv, or .xlsx.
• If you have added students to the GitHub project, they can upload to the shared project on their own. If not, they can share their annotation files with you, and you can upload them.

To create and upload annotations, follow the instructions in our documentation.