Introduction to Audiovisual Archives

Chapter 1

Context and Issues ¹

1.1. The ARA program – a brief historical overview

This book presents the results of a 10-year collective research effort on the issue of analysis of audiovisual corpora forming part, e.g. of a digital library. The advantages and issues involved in analyzing an audiovisual corpus are many and often very different from each other. In any case, they far exceed the “standard” framework of library and/or documentary sciences and techniques. On the other hand, they are reminiscent of the issue of monitoring expertise and concrete exploitation of information or knowledge in the different economic sectors.

For all contributions in this book, the reference context for addressing the question – as complex as it is exciting – of analyzing audiovisual texts or corpora is the ARA (Audiovisual Research Archives – in French: Archives Audiovisuelles de la Recherche¹ or AAR) program. The ARA program is a research and development project of the Cognitive Semiotics and New Media Team (Equipe Sémiotique Cognitive et Nouveaux Médias – ESCoM) of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH – House of Human Sciences Foundation) put in place in 2001 following several years of research on the conceptual analysis of digital data and the issues surrounding digital libraries for research, education and culture (see [DFS 97; VHF 97a; VHF 97b; AKV 99]). The ARA program is especially dedicated to the issue of compiling, processing and analyzing audiovisual corpora, as ...