Indices into IPS text and video materials.

Video Corpus Control

The primary control files for the video corpus were for years in spreadsheet format. Originally,keeping the vignette control files in compatible formats permitted one, ad lib, to merge the files by the simplest cut and paste operations, with merging accomplished through sorting rows into order by Peggy’s life day dates. This is no longer possible, since the on-line index (linked below) is current and separate from the Vignette index.

LC3cV01 Video Control and Index

The categories of relevance marked by “x’s” in the first 18 months’ table entries no longer apply directly. They are being replaced by the use of tags (in the left sidebar). But the application is non-trivial because the comments of the original index apply to entries in the individual clips presented as clip “panes” in the video panels. These comments will eventually be restored to their appropriate clips as the process of uploading clips and compressing the index goes forward. Uploading video clips is the first priority; tagging panels is second, and restoring comments to individual clip panes is third.

The titles of clips show in the individual panes and the text below them suggest what the activity is relevant to. Many specify the objects in the immediate context. The labels are not claims. For example, in P167F, where the title is “Juggling,” there is no intent to suggest competence or instruction. The intent is to suggest the activities may involve goals, pre-cursors or components of mature, later developing activities. Similarly, in the clips labeled “Discrete Substance,” I am not “teaching to” Piaget’s experimental task as any sort of test, but rather using his experimental situation for activities in which one might see and capture a path of incremental development for this child.

The grounds for segmenting the video tapes into episodes and clips are revealed in the name codes of each clip. The number following the initial “P” is Peggy’s life-week. The letters represent divisions based on either “Themes,” “French Scenes,” or a significant new initiative in the action. Where these alphabet coded segments are further subdivided (into sequentially numbered clips), the reason is to keep the digital file size small enough for network down loading.

The dates of the video sessions are less precise after Peggy’s fourth year begins. Our “experiments” typically were on Sundays, when we were all at home and had fewer outside pressures. If the actual day is known to be some other specific date, that will be given. Otherwise the dates mean “this date is the Sunday of Peggy’s Nth week. It would be unusual, perhaps even a surprise if the actual session date were different by more than one day or two.

The plugin I use with WordPress to display video clips of the corpus (FV Flowplayer) has a problem when a video panel expresses clips in multiple panes. The “autoplay=false” parameter set by the administrator is not effective in that configuration. I have found a “work-around” in FireFox, where adding “autoplay=false” to all invocations of the plugin code prevents multiple pane activation. This workaround is inadequate for Safari. (When a multiple active-panes bug manifests, one can always click on the pause token for each pane that inappropriately activates [such is not, of course, an acceptable fix]).

As of March 31 2013, online Panels have been created most of the videos in the first three years of the Infant Peggy Corpus. The original video tapes have been digitized, segmented into “Panes”, and uploaded for online access. The video distribution goes across the six years of the study but is concentrated in Peggy’s first three and a half years. Uploading further Panels to “fill in the gaps” will continue, and tagging the video clips is the new frontier task.