Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Breaking the LHE domain down in this way into a set of typical
topoi
,
configurations
or
topical structures*
, is a choice motivated by a “policy” which
underlies the goal(s) of an archive: goals regarding empirical coverage of the
domain, goals regarding the publication and diffusion of one's audiovisual heritage,
goals relating to the long-term preservation and transmission of one's heritage.
In other words, the
topoi
which we chose in the context of our ASW-HSS
research project, and which gave rise to the LHE archives, are of course in no way
obligatory or exclusive. Other digital archives or libraries which deal with the
literary domain may conceive it differently. Any attempt at analysis must still
necessarily be based on structures or thematic configurations (and, more
specifically, topical configurations) and therefore assume intellectual and “policy”
choices. Once the choice has been made to use a
topos
or a set of
topoi
representative of a referential domain of knowledge, each topos must be explicitized
and described generically in the form of a
definitional configuration
, i.e. in the form
of a structure which defines the internal organization of the topos. We have seen a
series of concrete examples of these configurations in Chapter 5, and will come back
to them later on (see section 12.4).
The qualification of a topos in the form of an explicit structure or definitional
configuration can only be carried out using a
metalanguage
- hence the crucial
importance, for any metalanguage, of the ASW meta-lexicon in general and the
vocabulary of conceptual terms whose root is [Object of analysis], in particular.
Together with the
library of schemas
and
sequences
(see Chapter 16)
representing the relational part (i.e. the
library of relations
between the conceptual
terms) and the
thesaurus
(see Chapter 15), the
meta-lexicon
of conceptual terms is
one of the most essential components of any metalanguage of description of textual
corpora - audiovisual or otherwise.
Let us now come back to the question of the referential domain of knowledge
thematized (or simply thematizable) in an audiovisual corpus. All the topoi
identified and qualified in the form of definitional configurations together make up
the particular vision which an archive (or library) has of its domain of knowledge.
It is easy to see, here, that there remains a small degree of ambiguity in the use of
the term
referentialdomainofknowledge
:
‒
intuitively and “pre-analytically”, this term means the
givenreality
about
which an archive or library speaks;
‒
explicitly and analytically, however, the term means the
representation
, the
“vision” that an archive or library has of a given reality in the form of a set of topical
structures.
