Distributing Data Sessions: Supporting remote collaboration with video data

The design of distributed infrastructures to support remote collaboration among groups of social scientists raises new computational and networking challenges that Grid developers are currently targeting. Beyond such technical goals, however, the e-Science programme as a whole is increasingly recognizing the critical need for a comprehensive understanding of ordinary dayto-day work in the sciences. We have investigated one particular area of collaborative social scientific work – the analysis of video data. This paper discusses current practices of social scientific work with digital video; describes the resulting requirements for distributed video analysis systems; and outlines our initial programme of infrastructure and interface development to address these requirements as part of the VidGrid project.