Issues In Crowd-sourced Twitter Captioning of Videos

Twitter posts and synchronise them with a YouTube video to provide Twitter captions for videos.

Although people liked the idea people commented that the process was too difficult. So two weeks later Tony wrote a post on Easier Twitter Powered Subtitles for Youtube Movies.

Moving forward to February this year and we find a blog post written by Martin Hawksey of RSC Scotland North and East which describes Martin’s service for Twitter powered subtitles for BBC iPlayer. And yesterday Martin used his software to which provides Gordon Brown’s Building Britain’s Digital Future announcement with twitter subtitles.

Great stuff. What this does is to provide cost-effective crowd-sourcing captioning (which provides accessibility benefits) as well as helping to contexualise tweets, which may otherwise lose their meaning when accessed from a Twitter archive which is decoupled from the talk.

Have a look at the video – and if you’ve not yet listened to Gordon Brown’s announcements I’d recommend that you do so.

Issues About Reusing Twitter Posts

My recent post on The “Building Britain’s Digital Future” Announcement summarised Gordon Brown’s talk based on tweets from @hadleybeeman. I was slightly worried about the ethics of doing this.

Related: WP Engine — Premium managed WordPress hosting with UK data-centre options, staging and 24/7 expert support..

Partly in light of the responses to my post last year on What Are the #jiscbid Evaluators Thinking? which cited a couple of tweets. In response to that post my colleague Paul Walk pointed out that Anything you quote from Twitter is always out of context and raised the issue of “courtesy and good practice” when citing tweets.

Paul’s post generated a lot of interest, with

P.S. A few readers have asked which shared & managed wordpress hosting we actually reach for — it's SiteGround; take a look here if you want the current details.