Searching Instructional Videos

Searching Instructional Videos

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Watching video on the internet has become very popular, generally beating out reading as the preferred method of obtaining information. People would rather passively accepted the information instead of deliberately read about it. I'd figure if I made a video about this topic, it would be viewed more than this post read. Furthermore, a video has a defined length of time that it will be completed. Reading depends on the reader's abilities in order to finish the text. But there's one thing that written words excel in while videos are near useless.

In the information age, we often look toward the internet to learn how to do something. In speaking about video, we can learn about how to do something we've never done before easier by visually seeing the steps unfold rather than read passages. However, what happens when we simply need to refresh our knowledge at a specific step of a process? We would have to recall where that step was in a video we saw or, if we've never saw the video, we'd have to watch the video in order to find that one step we needed. We also wouldn't know for sure that the step was included until we watch the entire video, only to find out that our time was wasted and to move on to another source.

This is the reason why text still shines when it comes to instructions. You are able to search the text for keywords that will find sections of interest and then reference those sections with the small pieces of instructions you might need. Making a video work in a similar fashion would take a great deal of thought to produce correctly. One option with current technology is to create a table of contents with a video that sends the user to the part of the video that a topic is discussed. However, that topic may not contain the keywords included in that part of the video. The next possible part would be to include the script for the video so that it is keyword searchable. The last idea that we might be close to achieving given our growth in technology is searching the automatic close captioning text for the video.

All of this is well and good for videos where there is a voiceover but, what happens when there are only pictures? How would we search for the relevant information about the video and where it appears. Again, perhaps a table of contents would work but we might still miss information. Granted, how would one find instructions with only pictures and no relevant keywords either? But the point I am trying to make here is that instructions should always have a great deal of text accompanying them until we have the ability to search media using pictures. Alas, the way the computer searches will have to be totally reinvented before we see this but we aren't terribly far off.