About Mediathread
Mediathread is a platform that supports close analysis of multimedia items within a class or research group. It allows users to collect videos, images, and audio from a broad range of public and library websites into a course-specific website.
Once collected into Mediathread, selections of multimedia items can be created, tagged, and incorporated into compositions and discussions.
- Built to support a range of classes, Mediathread enables instructors to create innovative assignments, track responses, and supply linked feedback. Instructors can ask students to:
- Make selections of a designated item, and tag and annotate these selections
- Author compositions that cite and integrate multimedia selections
- Participate in threaded discussions that cite and integrate multimedia selections
- Juxtapose and create interactive sequences of multimedia selections
Mediathread’s tagging and searching support also facilitates individual or group research across media formats. Controlled vocabularies can be defined and applied to a corpus of source materials.
When participating in class discussions or creating individual or group projects, Mediathread users are able to view video and/or images closely, clip video segments or images, attach annotations and tags to their selections, and organize clips for assignments that integrate written analysis with targeted selections of images and video. By facilitating the easy creation, organization, and incorporation of clips into written analysis, Mediathread significantly advances the role of multimedia in scholarly analysis.
Licensing Attribution
The original Mediathread was developed by Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Since its launch in 2010, Mediathread has been used in over 1,000 courses at Columbia and is used by many different universities and research groups across the world, including Stanford University.
Columbia has licensed its code under GNU GPLv3 and its content under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.