Social science researchers are making increasing use of digital video. All of us, researchers
or not, have an alluring range of commercial web sites for sharing video, although these do
not cater for long-term reuse of video in research. But what kind of roles does video fulfil as
research data? And what curation issues and challenges does video raise for researchers
and their institutions? The phenomenal growth in public use of digital video is a topic of social
research; in the first six months of 2008, users of Youtube uploaded more video footage than
the top three U.S. TV networks would have broadcast if they had been operating 24 hours
per day over their sixty-year lifespan (Wesch, 2008). Yet there have been few studies of
social scientists’ own uses of digital video data in their research
