Audiovisual Archives: Digital Text and Discourse Analysis

Chapter 10

The Procedure of Controlled Description of an Audiovisual Corpus

 

10.1. Introduction

In addition to the procedure of free description*, which offers the analyst the possibility of producing his own metadata relating to an audiovisual text or corpus, we use a second procedure of description and indexation which is wholly or partly guided by the use of a thesaurus*. This type of procedure is called a procedure of controlled description.

The advantages of this procedure are twofold. The first is that it offers a considerable time gain in the actual analysis of an audiovisual text. In a manner of speaking, the thesaurus forces the analyst to choose the most appropriate expressions to describe the content of an audiovisual text or corpus. As we shall see later on, no specific procedure of controlled description ever uses the entirety of the thesaurus, but rather one of its many facets covering the field of referential values of a conceptual term or a configuration of conceptual terms to be filled in by the analyst. The field of referential values of a facet is made up of one (or several) lists (hierarchical or otherwise) of normalized expressions (descriptors). Yet almost none of these lists contains a great many normalized expressions and therefore does not require a huge effort on the part of the analyst in order to be properly handled.

A second advantage lies in the fact that the expressions which are supposed to represent the content of an audiovisual text or corpus ...