Introduction to Audiovisual Archives

Chapter 6

Uses of an Audiovisual Resource ¹

6.1. The “Uses” part of the ASW description workshop

By the term “use”, we mean the utilization by the end-users of the video being analyzed. A given type of use supposes that the target audience can be defined as an individual or a group, sharing a more or less stable body of common knowledge.¹ Hence, a raw (non-segmented) source video, is implicitly destined for a certain use (or uses), and a recipient (or several types of recipients). It has its own identity, a specific profile, called “authorial” identity which presupposes the existence of an author – individual or collective, identified or anonymous, static or dynamic.

However, under certain conditions, the implicit uses of the video and the variety of its recipients may be extended. Segmentation of the video is one of these conditions. This produces and isolates the audiovisual segments – parts or subparts – whose variety offers multiple uses. Remember that, according to one of the so-called “compositional” semiotic models, from a semantic point of view, a video forms a consistent whole made of a collection of “parts”. Each of these parts can in turn be broken down into subparts. It is the Segmentation Workshop (see Chapter 2) which enables us to extract and subsequently analyze them, either individually as distinct parts, or as a group of parts around a theme, a type of discourse, aimed at specific recipients and uses.

As we shall discover, this section of the Description Workshop ...