Audiovisualities out of Annotation: Three Case Studies in Teaching Digital Annotation with Mediate

This article describes Mediate: An Annotation Tool for Audiovisual Media, developed at the University of Rochester, and emphasizes the platform as a source for the understanding of film, television, poetry, pop songs, live performance, music, and advertising as shown in three cases studies from film and media studies, music history, and linguistics. In each case collaboration amongst students was not only key, but also enabled by Mediate, which allows students to work in groups to generate large amounts of data about audiovisual media. Further, the process of data generation produces quantitative and qualitative observation of the mediated interplay of sight and sound. A major outcome of these classes for the faculty teaching them has been the concept of audiovisualities: the physically and culturally interpenetrating modes of audiovisual experience and audiovisual inscription where hearing and seeing remediate one another for all of us as sensory and social subjects. Throughout the article, we chart how audiovisualities have emerged for students and ourselves out of digital annotation in Mediate.