Analysis of an Audiovisual Resource - Audiovisual Archives - page 9

a major concern for universities and other public-sector establishments for research
and higher education. 9
1.3.Descriptivemodels
The actual work of constituting and exploiting these different, functionally
distinct corpora is necessarily determined by ( conceptual or metalinguistic ) models
making up the reference framework , both intellectual and practical, for the actors
involved in that complex process which is the digitization of a body of knowledge
heritage, i.e. the collection, processing and analysis, publication or republication and
longer-term preservation of all sorts of documents bearing witness to the knowledge
and savoir-faire , the beliefs and values, the norms and rules, the customs and
behaviors, etc. of a person, a social group, an institution or even a country, a region,
an era.
Now we perhaps have a fuller understanding of the strategic position occupied
by the concept designer in the workflow of constitution and diffusion of bodies of
knowledge heritage. The concept designer prepares, develops, manages, etc. all the
models needed to bring to fruition the activities involved in the constitution,
exploitation, diffusion and conservation of a body of knowledge heritage in the form
of a corpus of textual data (more particularly, in our case, audiovisual data). In
comparison to the different functionally distinct types of corpus which mark the
process of constitution and diffusion of a knowledge legacy, in particular it is a
question of:
- the models of description* needed by the analyst* (another key role in the
working process in question) to carry out the description, indexation and annotation
of audiovisual corpora;
9 As (at least indirect) proof for this statement, we can cite the proliferation of video libraries
and other “channels” online documenting the activities (research, teaching, etc.) of such-and-
such a university, such-and-such a research establishment. However, a strong impression of a
certain degree of “naivety” persists when looking at many of these initiatives. This impression
of naivety refers back to the fact that the designers of these institutional channels or video
libraries seem to consider that the audiovisual collection being diffused in itself constitutes a
patrimonial corpus (or another type of corpus: field , analyzed , published/republished , etc.).
More generally, it is very rare to find initiatives which clearly distinguish between the
collection of audiovisual data held in an institutional video library or channel, and the corpus
of audiovisual resources - a corpus being a selection of audiovisual data drawn from a
collection, which fulfill a function , and which obey an objective (to document a field work,
interpret a subject, publish an event, promote an institution's reputation, etc.).