Audiovisual Archives: Digital Text and Discourse Analysis

Preface

 

One of the main issues involving today’s digital libraries and archives is of allowing users an active appropriation of their textual and, more specifically, audiovisual resources. Active appropriation means adaptation of the audiovisual data to the specific needs and interests of a user or group of users. A group of users may in fact be an entire, enclosed little “community”, e.g. the participants in a research project or the members of a teaching team, as well as virtual “community”- type networks which are active the whole world over. Examining this process of active appropriation involves:

1) effectively and systematically taking account of the internal structural organization of the audiovisual text, i.e. by looking at more precisely the semiotics of the text or discourse [STO 03];

2) defining and developing models and tools to enable anyone to physically and/or intellectually process the audiovisual text (e.g. by analyzing and interpreting it);

3) the opportunity made available to anyone and everyone to become an author in the sense of someone intending to produce and publish one or more new versions of a pre-existing audiovisual text or corpus of texts – new versions which are better adapted to a specific use context or, more generally, to the (cultural) profile and expectations of a given audience.

One particularly central question in this context is of the metalanguage of description*¹, which is needed to enable anyone to carry out analyses* of all sorts of audiovisual ...