Cognitive technologies for establishing, sharing and comparing perspectives on video over computer networks

The rapidly increasing presence of digital video recordings and new communication capacities on the Internet has created new possibilities for collaboration in behavioral science research. Unfortunately, digital video has so far proven to be an unnatural medium for collaborative activity due to a lack of adequate tools that support joint analysis of a shared video record. We describe seven socio-technical design challenges that face what we term computer-supported collaborative video analysis. We also describe a software environment that we have created called DIVER that was designed to address these challenges and provide a platform for the fluid exchange of video data as well as the insights that the data elicit. The affordances of DIVER for supporting collaboration around video are grounded in the descriptions of two academic contexts in which the software played a central role in the group's video-based activities. The potential of DIVER to serve as a 'cognitive technology' is discussed.