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- if the topical structure is reduced to a single conceptual term selected by the
analyst (in our case, if it is reduced to the lone conceptual term [Cultural construct]),
the description only gives information about this term;
- if the topical structure is made up of two or more conceptual terms, the free
description has to provide information about the collection of selected terms, not just
of this-or-that term taken in isolation.
For instance, if the topical structure defined by the analyst is made up of the
conceptual terms {[Cultural construct] and [Historical era]}, then the description
must take account of this particular structure. Thus, given this topic with a historical
dimension, a free description such as “political culture of the 18 th Century” is
appropriate; a free description such as “Andean political culture”, on the other hand,
is not.
In the context of our research on the description of the audiovisual corpora which
make up the different experimentation workshops of the ASW-HSS project 1 , we
have defined, developed and used a whole series of models of referential description
whose particularity consists precisely of allowing the analyst a certain degree of
liberty to configure his own topical structure instead of imposing a “prefab” topical
structure on his work.
However, as regards the model which defines the working form shown in
Figures 8.7 and 8.8, these models are often simpler and merely exploit the
taxonomic nature of the ASW meta-lexicon (the vocabulary) of conceptual terms
(see Chapters 12 and 13). For instance, Figure 8.7 shows the option given to the
analyst to choose, in the branch [Social collectivity] the most appropriate conceptual
term(s) to describe a specific subject in an audiovisual text which refers to this
group, that actor, the other movement, etc. However, the elaboration of a form of
description of the audiovisual content which only includes the branch
[Social collectivity] in that part of it reserved for referential description, is already
very useful to describe and index audiovisual (or other types of) corpora making up
an archive or library of sociological resources.
1 Remember that this project contains the following particularly noteworthy archives:
“Culture crossroads Archive (CCA)” (http://semiolive.ext.msh-paris.fr/arc/); “Literature from
Here and Elsewhere (LHE)” (http://semiolive.ext.msh-paris.fr/alia/); and “Arkeonauts'
Workshop (ArkWork)” (http://semiolive.ext.msh-paris.fr/ada/), which were also joined by
many other archives over the course of the project.
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