Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1.4.Ontheactivityofanalysisofaudiovisualcorpora
As we have just seen, the analysis of an audiovisual text or corpus constitutes
both a set of concrete activities aimed at filling a gap in knowledge or information,
and one of the main stages in the process of compiling and distributing a body of
knowledge heritage.
As has already been said, the objectives of analysis may be highly disparate, and
obey extremely diverse and particular intentions. When speaking of the
analysisof a
textual or audiovisual corpus
, one often thinks either of academic research activities
on or based on a corpus
11
or of professional assessments (e.g. in the context of the
information monitoring [STO 11d] and critical and comparative analysis of
“strategic” knowledge for an activity sector, an enterprise, an institution, etc.).
Yet the analysis of audiovisual corpora is just as important and unavoidable in
other key activities of our economic, social and cultural existence. Thus, it is as
much an indispensable element of “upstream” (preliminary)
pedagogical activity
as
downstream (“
in situ
”, “in class”). Upstream, it forms part of the teaching
preparation itself; downstream, it is one of the most important activities in the
appropriation of knowledge - linguistic or otherwise (on this subject, see the very
interesting studies and explanations in [MCK 06; BRA 07; HQS 07; PBR 07] or
[KET 02].
Analytical activities also form a central activity in the constitution and
monitoring of a digital library (or video-library). They serve the “traditional”
objectives of description, classification and indexation of textual (and, more
particularly, audiovisual) data making up the collection of a library or video-library.
The objectives are manifold, including those forming part of the task of the librarian,
the archivist or the documentary-maker. Analysis involves classifying the data (by
collection, author, subject, genre, language, year, etc.), identifying and describing
“paragraphs” or segments which are of particular interest and rendering them
accessible to a given interested audience, producing
enriched versions
to make them
pertinent to more specialized objectives (such as teaching or learning) or even, for
certain select parts, to propose
linguistic
or
pragmatic adaptations
aimed at an
audience who cannot appreciate the value of the original data for lack of adequate
linguistic and cultural skills (also see [SAK 11]).
Let us also cite the case of publication and/or republication of a piece of
audiovisual data or a whole corpus of audiovisual data. Analysis plays a crucial and
11 In linguistics, there is a whole specialized branch devoted to this goal; in rhetoric and
discourse analysis, one relies on textual corpora in order to comprehend the syntagmatic
development of particular genres of discourse (see e.g. [BIB 07; MCK 06]).
