About Qideos.Online
A Public Service
VidStance.com is a non-profit initiative. It is a service to society and a contribution to public discourse. By removing the "grunt work" of transcription and data sorting, AI allows us nowadays to produce more, think deeper, and explore a wider range of perspectives than ever before.
This platform proves that in the age of AI, a human operating AI can make productive contributions to the global knowledge base. AI should not be used to replace the researcher, but to enable the researcher-as-architect to transform the vast ocean of digital conversations into a structured map for our collective future.
Intro: From Anthropological Roots to Digital Frontiers
VidStance was born at the intersection of traditional social science and the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence. As a political scientist and anthropologist by training, I built this platform on a fundamental belief: profound insights into our changing world are often also found in conversation, not just in formal publications.
Almost forty years ago, during anthropological research in North Wales, I spent countless days interviewing people about their lives and the shifts in the world around them. In those days, the process was painstaking. Every hour of conversation required many more hours of manual transcription and weeks of manual analysis. It was a labour of love, but one that was severely limited by the constraints of time and human processing.
Today, the world has changed, but the value of the "interview" remains. VidStance is proof that one person, supported by AI, can achieve a level of productivity and depth that he himself would have considered unthinkable until recently. I hope that visitors to this website will find it useful and at times entertaining, as I have also incorporated some playlists with entertainment from one of my other websites (Qideos.Online).
Eric Wassink
Why Video? A Tribute to Content Creators
Traditional research often relies on formal academic publications. While essential, these papers often miss the raw, immediate, and nuanced perspectives shared by experts in long-form interviews, podcasts, and debates.
There is a wealth of "tacit knowledge" expressed in these conversations - insights that may never make it into a formal journal but are critical for understanding the rapid evolution of AI, geopolitics, and the global economy. VidStance is my way of capturing, structuring, and synthesising this "living knowledge." It is also a tribute to the creators of the high-quality content published on YouTube; their work provides intellectual raw material for the public debates of the 21st century.
The Methodology: The Researcher as Architect
At VidStance, I do not use AI to replace thought, but to architect outcomes. My process is a modern evolution of the anthropological method:
- Digital Ethnography: I treat high-level video content as a field site, capturing the voices of the world’s leading thinkers and news sites.
- AI-Powered Transcription: What used to take days now takes seconds. I use advanced AI to convert speech into structured, timestamped data, preserving the integrity of the original conversation.
- Interrogative Analysis: I do not ask AI to "think" for me. I use it to interrogate the data, asking specific research questions to extract deep insights while strictly adhering to the source material.
- Strategic Synthesis: The final step is always human. I combine these AI-generated insights into coherent reports, ensuring that empathy, ethics, and political nuance remain at the heart of the analysis.