Master of Science, Aug. 7, 1992

The Anthropologist's Video Notebook is a video database application that allows researchers to present movies in a format that reflects the contextual complexity of ethnographic data. The Anthropologist's Video Notebook is grounded in both the practice of ethnographic research and motion picture production. The lexical descriptions of video content are represented using the Stratification system. Stratification is a context-based layered annotation method which treats descriptions of videos as objects. Stratification supports the complimentary and at times contradictory descriptions which result when different researchers use video source material which is available on a random access video workstation. The development of the Anthropologist's video notebook is based on real field work experience in the state of Chiapas Mexico. The inegration of ethnographic research methods and video production heralds a new research methodolgy called video ethnography. Video ethnography is the study of how meanings are attributed to video over time. The Stratification system allows for the analysis of the significance of the content of video in terms of the context of where it was recorded and also the context where it appears in an edited sequence.

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