As an example, a camcorder was used to capture software demonstrations and presentations at a 3-day GNOSIS workshop in Tokyo in March 1993 involving some 30 participants. The slides presented were collected together with the handouts circulated, largely technical papers from conference proceedings and internal reports. On return to Calgary, the papers were optically recognized using Xerox AccuText with an accuracy of some 98%, remarkably high considering that some of the papers were n'th generation copies of double-column conference material in 9pt type. The slides were digitized and the movies converted to QuickTime and lightly edited in Adobe Premiere. The movies were shot with a Sony TR101 which has optical image stabilization that compensates for the slight instabilities of long hand-held shots. The editing was necessary primarily to allow for participants walking in front of the camera in what was a very informal setting--it is not appropriate to attempt to establish studio conditions at a scientific workshop.
The resultant material was put into a uniform style in Microsoft Word, resulting in a 300-page workshop proceedings (GNOSIS, 1993) containing 30 articles and 8 QuickTime movies. Figure 4.1 shows a page from the proceedings with the heading, comments, and movies of computer software demonstrations preceding a technical paper. The production time to OCR the source material, edit it into a uniform format, digitize the slides and movies, and issue the proceedings in print and CD-ROM was one week. The effort required was some 40 person-hours. Thus, a high-quality workshop proceedings can be produced after the event without any additional effort on the part of the participants, indeed without any advance warning that there is any intent to do so. The total cost of producing the proceedings was about $3,000, about the same as the air fare to travel to Tokyo.
This application is significant to the support of the semi-formal discourse in scholarly communities that takes place through seminars, workshops and informal conferences. Much of what occurs at such meetings in currently lost and not disseminated to others, and yet digital document technology now makes it simple to capture the essence of a meeting without imposing constraints on the participants.
Figure 4.1 Workshop proceedings with embedded demonstrations