Community
Connect, collaborate, and contribute with fellow Media Suite users and developers.
Who is this community for?
The Media Suite Community brings together everyone who works with the CLARIAH Media Suite — whether you are:
- A researcher in media studies, history, linguistics, or the broader digital humanities
- A developer building tools, scripts, or integrations on top of the Media Suite API
- A data curator or archivist managing audiovisual collections
- An educator using the Media Suite in teaching
- Simply curious about computational approaches to audiovisual heritage
All levels of technical expertise are welcome. The community thrives on diverse perspectives.
Working Groups
The community organises itself around thematic working groups. Current active groups include:
Audiovisual Search & Retrieval
Focused on improving and evaluating search strategies across heterogeneous audiovisual collections. Topics include automatic speech recognition (ASR) quality, multilingual search, and relevance ranking for media researchers.
Annotation & Scholarly Workflows
Explores how researchers use the Media Suite’s annotation tools in practice, and how annotation data can be exported, shared, and reused in downstream analyses. Connects to the broader W3C Web Annotation ecosystem.
Data Stories & Reproducibility
Supports researchers in creating and publishing Media Suite Data Stories — Jupyter-notebook-based narratives that combine code, data, and scholarly argument. The group works on templates, best practices, and peer review processes.
Developer & API Working Group
A technical group for those building on or extending the Media Suite infrastructure. Covers API usage, CLARIAH-AP data model alignment, IIIF integration, and open-source contributions to the beeldengeluid GitHub organisation.
How to Join
Participation is open and free. There is no formal membership — just show up where the conversation is happening:
GitHub Discussions
The primary asynchronous forum for questions, feature requests, and general conversation. Visit the mediasuite-website discussions on GitHub.
Mailing List
A low-traffic list for announcements and working-group updates. Send a blank email to mediasuite-community+subscribe@googlegroups.com to subscribe.
Community Calls
Monthly open video calls (usually the third Thursday of each month, 14:00–15:00 CET). Connection details are posted in GitHub Discussions one week in advance. Calls are conducted in English; Dutch is also welcome.
Contributing
There are many ways to contribute, regardless of your background:
- Write a Data Story documenting a research workflow or dataset exploration
- Report issues with the Media Suite via the issue tracker
- Improve documentation — the docs are open source and pull requests are welcome
- Share a use case at a community call or as a guest post on this site
- Help other users by answering questions in GitHub Discussions
- Propose a working group on a topic not yet covered above
Submitting a Guest Post
To submit a news post or tutorial for this community site, open a pull request against the media-suite-community repository adding a Markdown file to _posts/. Follow the naming convention YYYY-MM-DD-your-title.md and include front matter specifying layout: post, title, author, categories, and a short excerpt.
Code of Conduct
This community follows the CLARIAH Code of Conduct. In brief: be respectful, assume good faith, and keep discussions constructive. Harassment of any kind will not be tolerated. Contact the moderators at mediasuite@beeldengeluid.nl if you experience or witness a problem.
Useful Links
| Resource | Link |
|---|---|
| Media Suite | mediasuite.clariah.nl |
| Data Stories | mediasuitedatastories.clariah.nl |
| Documentation | mediasuite.clariah.nl/documentation |
| GitHub Organisation | github.com/beeldengeluid |
| CLARIAH | clariah.nl |
| Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision | beeldengeluid.nl |