Programme of Study and Year: 1st year Informatics (MInf)
Intern Position: Media and Podcasting Intern
Introduction
Hi! I’m Tallulah and I’m in my 4th week as the Media and Podcasting Intern with Media Hopper Create. So far, I’ve been looking through videos uploaded to Media Hopper Create to analyse their metadata and see how it could be improved, coming up with a metadata guidance sheet, and I’ve collated videos to display on the front page that correspond to monthly themes.
Metadata
Most of my internship so far has involved looking at metadata. Metadata essentially is data about data. In the context of Media Hopper Create, it is the information associated with the different videos that have been uploaded, for example, title, video description, tags, captions, publisher, etc. Having good metadata will make it easier for users of Media Hopper Create to find videos. Unfortunately, the quality in the metadata across the videos is quite inconsistent, which is why one of my jobs is to write guidance to help improve the quality and to make the media easier to find.
What is good metadata?
Good metadata will help organise, find and understand data. It should serve as the bridge between content and users. When it comes to videos uploaded to Media Hopper Create, this is what good metadata should look like for media:
Title: should be clear and give context, for example, if it is a lecture., a good format would be: [Course Name] [Video Subject], rather than just naming a video “Overview” or “Summary”, e.g., “Object Oriented Programming, Lecture 2: Conditionals and Loops”. The users should be able to have a good idea what the video is about based on the title.
Description: brief description of what the video is about. It should not just be the title repeated, and it should be detailed enough so that users should not have to watch the whole video to see if it is going to be useful to them
Tags: should be relevant and specific to the video and should not be too general, for example having the tag “acts” on a video about climate change is not specific enough to the video. If the video is a podcast, adding the tag “podcast” will help users who are specifically finding a podcast, and/or if the video is only audio, adding the tag “audio only” will help users who are specifically finding audio only videos . It is better to have fewer tags that are specific and relevant to the video that will help the users find what they are looking for rather than having many tags that are not specific enough. Tags are added from frequently used words in the auto-generated captions, but sometimes these are not the most relevant, so after captioning is complete, it would be good to go through the tags and remove the irrelevant ones. Having a consistent format for tags will make it easier to organise videos, for example, a video with the tag “#artificialintelligence” will be considered different to a video with the tag “artificial intelligence”. A good format for tags is having them completely lowercase.
Captions: key accessibility feature for many, including but not limited to: people who are deaf or hard of hearing, people who have difficulty processing auditory information, and people whose native language is not English. At the very least, auto-generated captions should be requested for videos uploaded to Media Hopper Create, although at times they can be inaccurate, it is still better than nothing. These captions can either be corrected by the uploader or a request can be put in to have them reviewed and corrected by the captioning team, to make them as accurate as possible.
Attachments: The transcript, which is created from the auto-generated captions should be uploaded automatically. It is useful to not remove the transcript as it will allow users to search through it to see if the video is relevant. If a presentation is included in the video, uploading the slides will make it more convenient for the user.
Chapters: divides the video into different sections based on what it is about. Adding in chapters is very useful especially when the video is longer than 30 mins, because it will allow the user to find what they are looking for in a video without having to watch the whole video.
What is “bad” metadata?
When videos uploaded to Media Hopper Create have “bad” metadata, it can lead to poor content sorting, making it harder for users to find videos that they are looking for. For instance, when the title for a lecture video is just “0.0”, rather than having the course the lecture is from and more information about the video, it makes it very difficult for users to find this video unless they specifically have the link/know exactly where to find it. It also means that users are less likely to watch the video as they will not know if it is relevant to them. If a video has too many tags that aren’t specific or relevant to the video, when users try searching based on tags, many less relevant videos might come up, making it harder for the user to find what they are looking for.
My thoughts
In my opinion, the main issue with the metadata associated with videos uploaded to Media Hopper Create is that it is inconsistent. Having inconsistent metadata makes it much harder for videos to be organised, which will then make it harder for users to find what they are looking for. As part of my internship, I have been tasked with writing a metadata guidance sheet for video uploaders, which I hope will increase the consistency in quality of metadata of videos uploaded. Although this guidance won’t necessarily be able to change the metadata of the already uploaded videos, by hopefully improving the metadata for future videos, it will mean that users can access the most up to date and relevant videos to them much more easily.
What I have learned so far
Before I started this internship, I thought I had quite a good idea of what metadata was and its importance. Although I have only been interning with Media Hopper Create for 3 weeks, I realised, I have already learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot about Media Hopper Create and how useful it is as a service for the University, and I didn’t realise how such small details in metadata could make such a big difference in the user experience. I’m looking forward to the rest of my internship and learning even more about metadata.
