EVA: an experimental video annotator for symbolic analysis of video data

There is a joke about the man who has a map of the world ... with a scale of 1 mile to 1 mile. Sometimes video has the same character; it can be difficult to compress in useful ways. Sometimes you have to see all of it to understand any of it. Even so, the use of video as a research tool has been increasing rapidly, due partly to the reduction in equipment costs and partly to increased work in the areas of human factors and user interface design. This paper describes some of the issues surrounding capturing, recording, analyzing and presenting video data and describes a prototype system, called EVA, that is designed to address some of these issues.