Audiovisual Archives: Digital Text and Discourse Analysis

Conclusion and Perspectives

 

Having come to the end of this book, let us attempt to sum up, in a few paragraphs, the main points and issues involved in our work.

Faced with the proliferation of digital audiovisual data, one of the crucially important questions which arise is that of knowing how to turn these data into (intellectual) resources sui generis. In other words, the fact that an audiovisual document is available in digital form does not necessarily mean it becomes a (cultural) good for a given audience!

Indeed, it is one thing to set up a digital video library (or media library) containing a filmic or sound collection which, e.g. documents the activities of a scientific or teaching institution; it is quite another to transform that collection into resources for research, teaching, valorizing the institution’s image, etc. These two activities are completely dissimilar, and as long as we consider that mere digitization and uploading of such documents is a satisfactory solution to the constitution, communication and exploitation of bodies of knowledge heritage, we shall be treading a false path.

In this book, we have attempted to give both a theoretical and practical/technical treatment of the question of transforming a “simple” piece of digital data into a resource for a certain audience or user. We interpret this transformation as a process of appropriation of a piece of digital data by the audience or individual user in question. The appropriation may relate either to ...