Audiovisual Archives: Digital Text and Discourse Analysis

Chapter 1

Analysis of an Audiovisual Resource

 

1.1. Introduction

This book’s goal is to present a functional approach based on the semiotics* of the audiovisual text* [STO 03] for the analysis, i.e. the description, interpretation and indexing of digital audiovisual corpora.

The central notion used for this approach is of the model of description* of an audiovisual object, such as a video, based on a set of criteria which serve the semiotics to process the text object* and will be presented in greater detail in Chapter 3 of this book. Primarily, it is a question of the following criteria:

– the criterion of the text as a compositional entity (a text can, in principle, be broken down into “smaller” textual units, and in turn forms part of a textual environment, of what is, metaphorically speaking, a textscape or mediascape);

– the criterion of the text as a structural entity possessing a set of characteristic constituents (such as the thematic constituent, the narrative constituent, the rhetorical and discursive constituent, the multimodal expression of content, or the formal and physical organization of the content in the text); and finally,

– the criterion of the text as a historical entity (the text as a genre) and an evolutive entity (the text as the product of savoir-faire, in principle always modifiable).

The hypothesis behind this book is that any project of analysis of a textual corpus in general and an audiovisual corpus in particular – whatever its level of specialization ...