The Media Ecology Project is an architecture, methodology, and partnership network that facilitates new forms of scholarly production based on analysis of moving image materials. Our goal is to find ways to connect researchers to the archives and software tools needed for close textual studies of the subject matter, production, reception, and representational practices of media. It was initiated by Mark J. Williams at Dartmouth College and I am the architect for the project.

MEP is intended to engage multiple types of scholarship using a loose collection of digital tools. Tying these tools together is the MEP metadata server, which uses open standards like RDF, FOAF, and OpenAnnotation to share metadata about media clips across platforms. This metadata may be as simple as title and creator or as complex as time-based annotations shared by scholars. Whatever the metadata may be though, it is portable enough to flow to new software platforms and even back to the original source archive where it can enhance the source's records of their own collection

MEP launched with pilot project partners including groups at Domitor, the University of South Carolina, and UCLA. Initial partner archives include the Library of Congress, WGBH, and the Northeast Historic Film Archive.