Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The second scenario requires the intervention of a
modelizer*
(a
concept
designer
), i.e. a person or group of people specialized in defining and elaborating the
models of description needed to carry out the analysis and indexation of digital
resources. As regards the first scenario, we must once again distinguish between two
possibilities:
- the first possibility is that the analyst has to use the topical structure just as it
is. The analyst's role is “reduced” to its primary function, which is locating,
describing, explicitizing, interpreting or classifying and indexing the relevant
information in the text or texts which are the object of his work;
- the second possibility is that the analyst can
adapt
an existing topical structure
to his own needs. In other words, to use the topical structure which forms a working
sequence*
in a form for describing the content of an audiovisual text, the analyst
may be invited to select from the conceptual terms making up the topical structure,
choosing those which are actually relevant for his analysis. The analyst then takes on
part of the function of the concept designer, in that he reconfigures a pre-existing
topical structure in order to be able to use a variant of it which is appropriate to his
object, i.e. to the audiovisual text being studied. The extreme scenario here is, of
course, for the topical structure of a descriptive form to merge with the entire
vocabulary of conceptual terms making up the ontology of
objects of analysis*
of
the ASW
universeofdiscourse*
.
In this chapter, we shall briefly study the two possibilities cited - namely that of
direct use
(without modification) of an existing topical structure for analyzing a
piece of audiovisual content and that of -
indirect
- which requires the analyst to
reconfigure (to a greater or lesser extent) an existing topical structure to turn it into
an appropriate tool for his own analytical needs.
A topical structure resembles a semantic or conceptual graph [SOW 84; STO 85;
STO 87; STO 92] or indeed a “script” [SCH 77; STO 94]. A notable difference here
is that the terms (the “concepts”) making up a topical structure are defined in a
vocabulary of conceptual terms
(in a
descriptive ontology
) whereas conceptual or
semantic networks have nothing more than
a few conceptual basics
(also sometimes
called
cognitive
basics) making them difficult to use for concrete analyses.
The simplest case of a topical structure is where it is reduced to
a single
conceptual term
which, on its own, represents the knowledge object thematized in
an audiovisual text or corpus.
Figure 8.1 shows a concrete example of this, drawn from the
libraryofmodelsof
description*
which the analyst uses to describe audiovisual archives making up the
LHE archives. This particular case is of an audiovisual text (an interview) on the
subject of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. As Figure 8.1 shows, in order to identify and
