This page collects news, thoughts, ideas and events related to 21st century video data.

Dataset of Local Government Public Meetings in the US Released

Today, we cross-post news from Data Is Plural, an excellent website and newsletter that points to new and often unique datasets as they are released. Today’s edition of the newsletter featured a dataset that current and aspiring VDA users may get really excited about: LocalView, developed by Soubhik Barari and Tyler Simko, “is the largest dataset of local …

Analyzing Social Interaction with the help of Computer Vision

A bit of self-promotion: Together with my colleagues Doron Shiffer-Sebba and Yoav Goldstein, I just published an article in Sociological Methods & Research outlining a new way to analyze social interaction. We call the approach “3D Social Research” (3DSR). In a nutshell, 3DSR uses CV and 3D camera footage to study kinesics and proxemics, two …

Two surveys on Social Media Use

The PEW research center conducts surveys on social media use in the US that provide some useful information for researchers using online video data in their research. For instance, the surveys can help illustrate the importance of online videos as data in current and future social sciences research.

Data Set on Mask Wearing Compliance in New York City

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA, New York City’s public transportation provider), provides observational data on mask wearing compliance. This could be an interesting data source for researchers working on Covid and social interactions in public spaces (see, for instance, this paper and this paper by Marie Lindegaard, Wim Bernasco, and colleagues). Among other possibilities, the …

Thermal Imaging as a Tool for Social Research

Video technology keeps evolving, and this constant evolution creates new tools for social scientists to collect data and study situational dynamics during events and processes. One such innovation is thermal imaging cameras. Thermal imaging recordings are able to capture states of body heat and changes therein. This allows researchers new insights into people’s emotions, because …

Fake videos and how to detect them

A CNN article highlights how to distinguish deep fake videos from realones. They suggest checking for specific natural details, spottingpotential mismatches, and watching out for clues in the behaviour of theperson filmed or background. This can offer interesting insights for VDA researchers who use “ready-made” video data from online sources (i.e., video data they did …

Policing and crowd dynamics: An NYT visual investigation

The New York Times conducted a visual investigation on police use of force during a protest in Philadelphia in June 2020. The reporters use overhead video footage, numerous recordings from mobile phones on the ground, the video of a police car dash cam, area maps, interviews with protesters, and police documents. The visual investigation nicely …

Newsday documentary films interactions with Long Island real estate agents

Newsday published an investagation into racial discrimination in the housing market. They trained 25 undercover testers, who interacted with 93 real estate agents and secretly recorded 240 hours of meetings. The investigation is not only an indictment of unfair practices in the housing market, it shows interesting new ways to gather observational data in real-life …

The New Jersey Families Study – A potential data source for research on education, learning, and child development

This may be an interesting study for people working on education, learning, and child development: A team at Princeton collected video and survey data from over 20 families in New Jersey, filming interactions in their homes over a two-week period. As we understand, the data will eventually be accessible for other researchers. If you are …

New journal dedicated to the video-based study of social interaction

We recently learned about a relatively new journal, Social Interaction. Video-based Studies of Human Sociality. We have not yet published with this journal, but it may be a potential destination for publishing some types of VDA research. The journal also looks like a great resource for insights into video-based research. For instance, in a recent …

VDA YouTube channel launched

The new VDA YouTube channel features interdisciplinary research talks on novel (qualitative and quantitative) ways to use video data in the social sciences. It includes talks by sociologists, education researchers, computer scientists, psychologists, criminologists and others. We will keep adding new videos and talks in the future, so keep checking in!

Video Surveillance Footage Shows How Rare Violence Really Is (Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World, OUPblog).

Today videos from closed-circuit television, body cameras, police dash cameras, or mobile phones are increasingly used to capture violent events. Yet, examining footage of violent situations – from the very cameras set up because we believe that violence lurks around every corner – shows how rare violence really is. Continue reading.

Header image copyright: “50th Munich Security Conference 2014“, by Marc Müller, licensed under CC BY 3.0 DE.