Together with our film-theoretically-based method development comes the usage and development of technical infrastructures and tools, as the name eMAEX (“electronically based media analysis of expressive movement images”) suggests. Two central aspects are video annotation and data management.

In order to capture film-analytical observations close to the research subject, it is central for us to create timecode-based metadata for specific video files. At the beginning of our method development, we especially utilized the software ELAN in order to create free text descriptions for the analysis of compositional patterns and expressive movements. The efforts to make the processed research data accessible resulted in the database of US-American war film.

The AdA-project developed new possibilities of annotation, visualization and data exploration. An extensive documentation grants a detailed look into the modularity-oriented methodical and technical developments. The comprehensive AdA toolkit grants a low-threshold appropriation for different research projects. The project systematized film-analytical descriptive vocabulary within the framework of a machine-readable ontology, namely as the AdA Filmontology. Therefore, the open-source video annotation software Advene could be expanded and updated in order to suit the demands of collaborative annotation with a systematic vocabulary. In Advene, a browser-based timeline visualization in the style of a multi-track musical score was created. For especially a film analysis, which phenomenologically leans on annotation data and seeks to grasp the rhythm of spatiotemporal, multimodal compositional patterns, requires access to complex data sets, in order to be able to identify the patterns of audio-visual staging. With the web-based AdA Annotation Explorer, the annotations are freely available and can be explored and comparatively analyzed corpus-wide.