British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access

Recent additions to the Moving Image Gateway

The BUFVC Moving Image Gateway includes over 1,400 websites relating to video, multimedia and sound materials. These have been subdivided into   over 40 subject areas. To suggest new entries or  amendments, please contact us by email or telephone or visit  the Gateway at  http://bufvc.ac.uk/gateway/

BFI Player
The BFI’s video-on-demand platform offers over 1,000 titles, including feature films, documentaries and shorts, as well as lectures, discussions, interviews with directors and screenwriters, and other educational and contextual material. The content consists of a mixture of free and pay-per-view material: standard-definition feature films cost £2.50 for thirty days viewing: HD titles are £3.50. The site will show new films as well as footage from the BFI’s archive, including the entire Mitchell and Kenyon collection – all 800 films depicting life in Edwardian Britain, freely available online for the first time.
The material has been arranged into Collections and Genres, while a Trending page highlights topics which are currently popular. More content from the BFI’s archive will be added to the site as it is digitised, in line with the Film Forever initiative, which ultimately aims to put 10,000 movies online.

DHO:Discovery
The Digital Humanities Observatory ceased its activities in August 2013. One of its legacies was this gateway to digital collections and resources from Irish museums, archives, galleries and universities, which provides online access to collections of letters, drawings, paintings, books, music and spoken word recordings, photographs, films and television programmes. The contributing institutions include national bodies like RTÉ Archive and The National Gallery of Ireland, and the Irish Traditional Music Archive, as well as smaller collections of cultural significance, such as the Doegen Records Web Project: a digital archive of Irish dialect recordings made during 1928-31 which comprises early Irish language recordings of folktales, songs and other material. One of the site’s most interesting features is its Discovery page which not only lets users to search across the portal’s different collections, but also allows the results to be displayed in a variety of data visualisations, including Bubble Visualisations, Dendrograms, Word Clouds, Tree-Maps and Node Links. The visualisation options are accompanied by useful notes, explaining suitability and offering tips for users on which visualisations are most appropriate for displaying and exploring different kinds of data.

Global Lab Podcast
Produced by the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL, this series of podcasts considers the impact of technology on cities and global connectivity. Drawing on the expertise of mathematicians, information scientists, lawyers, digital humanities researchers and museum curators amongst others, the podcast, which follows a magazine format, looks at how technology affects all our lives, but is of particular interest for those interested in urban analysis and social complexity.

Sometimes the podcasts lose focus in their attempts to cover everything – Episode 6, for example, looks at “News on Vitruvian Man on Ice, visualising the Eurozone crisis, Faster than Light Neutrinos and the European Conference on Complex Systems [and] Media Framing in the Phillipines”. But in general the mixture of enthusiasm and cutting-edge research is a winning formula. One recent episode – Can Maths Predict A Riot – which considers the London riots of 2011 from a mathematical perspective, is a good example of what the podcast does best, ie. communicate complex ideas in an interesting way. The resource is free to listen to and can be subscribed via RSS, iTunes or downloaded from the site in mp3 format.

Seeing Speech
This resource has been produced for teachers and students of phonetics, lingusitics and speech therapy. A collaboration between five Scottish universities, it consists of synchronised ultrasound video, audio and 2D/3D diagrams of modelled speech and spontaneous speech, from a variety of different regions in Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Canada and New Zealand. The site’s accent chart presents a grid of words and speakers, so that users can compare how the same word is pronounced in different countries and regions.

UCD Scholarcast
This resource, hosted by University College, Dublin, is a Digital Humanities project dedicated to the dissemination of academic research in the field of Irish Studies and adjacent disciplines, through podcasting. The open-access, podcasts are by leading scholars, writers and artists – from University College Dublin and beyond – and there are currently eight series available.

The podcasts are characterised by a cross-disciplinary approach which highlights the latest research in Irish Studies, taking in literature, music, archaeology, gender studies and history. In Series 4 – Reconceiving the British Isles: The Literature of the Archipelago – various academics, from Ireland, Wales and England, consider how to approach twentieth century literature in a non-Anglocentric way. All the podcasts are accompanied by full transcripts, with footnotes and references, which can be downloaded in pdf format.

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