A Big Video Manifesto: Re-sensing Video and Audio

For the last few years, we have witnessed a hype about the potential results and insights that quantitative big data can bring to the social sciences. The wonder of big data has moved into education, traffic planning, and disease control with a promise of making things better with big numbers and beautiful visualisations. However, we also need to ask what the tools of big data can do both for the Humanities and for more interpretative approaches and methods. Thus, we prefer to explore how the power of computation, new sensor technologies and massive storage can also help with video-based qualitative inquiry, such as video ethnography, ethnovideo, performance documentation, anthropology and multimodal interaction analysis. That is why we put forward, half-jokingly at first, a Big Video manifesto to spur innovation in the Digital Humanities.