DAVALab – Digital Audio-Visual Annotation Lab
The Digital Audio-Visual Annotation Lab (DAVALab) develops an easy-to-use, web-based infrastructure for the automated analysis of text, speech, and video data. Researchers can upload interviews, conversations, or audiovisual recordings and receive high-quality annotations – such as transcriptions, speaker segmentation, facial expression and gesture recognition, or sentiment and emotion analysis. These results are delivered in standardized formats and can be used for further research, teaching, or public communication. Because DAVA Lab is a web application hosted at the University of Zurich (UZH) with a graphical user interface (GUI), no programming knowledge or special hardware is required.
Researchers across disciplines – from linguistics and psychology to media studies and AI – will be able to use DAVA to generate standardized, reusable datasets for multimodal research. The platform lowers technical barriers and promotes FAIR data practices, helping to make complex audiovisual analysis accessible and sustainable at UZH and beyond.
DAVALab builds on existing infrastructue initiatives:
- LiRI Corpus Platform – sofware for multimodal analysis of text, audio and video developed at the Linguistic Research Infrastructure
- CLARIN-CH – the Swiss national node of the European CLARIN research infrastructure.
- MAVA Cluster focused on interoperability and data exchage for multimodal data and tools, hosted by the ORD team of the Swiss Data Science Center (ETH/EPFL)
- Swiss AL – corpus platform for public discourse analysis developed by the ZHAW Digital Discourses Lab
The project is supported by the DSI, LiRI, and the Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich (UZH).
Project duration: 01.09.2025 - 31.08.2027
Contact: Dr. Teodora Vuković
Project Team
DAVALab is created by an interdisciplinary team of experts from speech science, computational linguistics, film studies, and data science and more.
- Dr. Teodora Vuković– project lead, multimodal analysis and computational linguistics
- Prof. Dr. Eleanor Chodroff – phonetics and speech processing
- Dr. Oksana Riba-Grognuz – open research data
- Prof. Dr. Josephine Diecke – film and media analysis
- Prof. Dr. Julia Krasselt – natural language processing and linguistic infrastructure
- Dr. Cristina Grisot – national coordinator of CLARIN-CH
- Dr. Valeriia Perepelytsia – phonetics and neuoscience
- Aref Farhadi Pour – speech processing, AI