Supporting Video Library Exploratory Search: When Storyboards are not Enough

Storyboards, a grid layout of thumbnail images as surrogates representing video, have received much attention in video retrieval interfaces and published studies through the years, and work quite well as navigation aids and as facilitators for shot-based information retrieval. When the information need is tied less to shots and requires inspection of stories and across stories, other interfaces into the video data have been demonstrated to be quite useful. These interfaces include scatterplots for timelines, choropleth maps, dynamic query preview histograms, and named entity relation diagrams representing sets of hundreds or thousands of video stories. One challenge for interactive video search is to move beyond support for fact-finding and also address broader, longer term search activities of learning, analysis, synthesis, and discovery. Examples are shown for broadcast news and life oral histories, drawing from empirically collected data showing how such interfaces can promote improved exploratory search. This paper surveys and reflects on a body of Informedia interface work dealing with news, folding in for the first time an examination of exploratory transactions with an oral history corpus.