Quick-slow: A way to give meaning to media?

I develop the platform for the folkstreams.net website, which is a non-profit archive for rare folklore documentary films. We transfer the films to video and then stream them to the web so they are not lost, molding in some archive never to be seen. Many of our films have not been seen for twenty years or more, one was rescued from a barn. As such, we are strong advocates of open access to archives (and I am happy to learn many other institutions in the folklore world also understand how important access is to a sustainable archive and are using the web in wonderful ways).

To the point. It has always been important for our films to be presented in context. I have always believed that media without context is meaningless, whether that is a family photograph or a documentary film. A photographic image is merely an interesting composition without the information necessary to understand it, to interpret it. All images must be read...oddly enough, since they are the seeming opposite of text, which everyone acknowledges must be read. We teach literacy, but we don't teach the equivalent for images. (What would that be imagacy, photoacy, videocy? That last one sounds too much like idiocy to be comfortable.). A photographic image may affect us as a work of art, or it may present an attractive composition, but beyond that it requires context. The same is true for moving pictures. This is why each film on our website is nestled in a set of contextual materials. I sometimes doubt that many people read them, or read the transcript, but they are there to give meaning to the films, to place them in context so that people may better understand the subjects and ideas presented in the film.

I've wanted for some to build a small content management system where

* Media is on an equal footing with text, but also where media is the centerpiece.
* Media is as easy to work with and place in context as working with text in a wiki.

There is a form, a mashup you might call it, between a Blog and a Wiki, called a Bliki. I had not paid too much attention to this development until I read on one of the advocate's websites that the idea of a Bliki involved a "quick-slow" process. The blog enables a user to quickly write a blog entry, something quick, potentially ephemeral and tied to time; At that moment or any time later, the user may also create a wiki page connected to the blog entry, for slower moving, more thoughtful and persistent content.

I think this would apply perfectly to such a media application, which would be useful in personal publishing and could help small archives (local history and genealogy societies, libraries and archives) manage and create access to their image collections. As volunteers scan images, they could upload them with descriptions as blog entries, then they or others could provide context through wiki pages associated with the image meta data in the blog entries. It would be upload, give a title and description, later come back, drop a wikiname in the description and then create a page. It could encourage local people to contribute memories to photographs, for example.

Today, I actually came across the first example in the wild of someone doing this, someone using the Bliki "quick-slow" philosophy to give meaning to images. "I added Wikipedia links to my Flickr photos..." (http://instones.org/archives/61 2007) This is exactly the kind of behavior I would like a web application to enable and encourage, which would facilitate quick image upload and meta data, but would also enable and encourage placing media in context, as well as supporting tagging for folksonomy. It's more a philosophy than a technology.