Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
unavoidable role “
upstream
” (in advance) of this activity - no publication wishing to
have a certain intellectual value can afford to dispense with a preliminary analysis of
the data it offers to a targeted or interested audience. Once again, the analysis may
consist of a series of activities of identification, description and classification of data
which are relevant for an envisaged publication. However, it may also consist of an
in-depth assessment of the data selected for a publication - an assessment which
serves the author (be they an individual or a collective) as a basis to support their
point of view, their vision of the question which motivates the publication.
Finally, one last example showing the centrality of activities of analysis of
textual and, more specifically, audiovisual corpora, is that of the constitution and
monitoring of personal archives such as, for instance, the management of the
audiovisual data to document the life (either the daily agenda or the narrative course
of life) of a person or family in the form of incidental events such as parties,
meetings and receptions, journeys, ritual activities, etc. It is well known that since
audiovisual recording materials have become commonplace, innumerable photos
and videos are constantly being created by an ever-growing number of individuals,
families, informal groups of people, etc., to document the timeline of their daily
lives. However, this gigantic mass of data produced necessarily has to undergo a
certain minimum degree of selection, classification and description in order to
“become” a personal/family/friends (etc.) archive in the proper sense of the term. In
other words, the personal memory, the familial past documented in the form of the
patrimonial corpora which make up the archive of a person, a family, a group of
friends, etc., are the products of analysis - without analysis, there would be no
archive, and no story either!
Analysis - whatever the context in which it is used and whatever its goals
(scientific, pedagogical, professional or “simply” personal) - still necessarily relies
on one or more metalinguistic systems, a
metalanguage of description*
without
which it could not be carried out. The
concrete use
of such a metalanguage is most
often found in the guise of (dynamic) forms, i.e. field interfaces categorized by a
selection of concepts relevant to the use in question (see, e.g. Figure 4.2 in Chapter
4). In the following chapters, we shall demonstrate how such dynamic forms are
alike and how to create them.
To conclude this general presentation devoted to the analysis of audiovisual
data, note that it - that is, the task of analyzing an audiovisual text - can be
compared to a “basic” piece of
fieldwork
in human and social sciences (for instance,
it can be compared perfectly well to a field investigation in ethnology or
archaeology). In order to finish field work (whether it finishes in success or failure is
another question), the analyst relies on
models
(either implicit or more-or-less
explicit) to “give meaning” to his field and to a working methodology. Thus, an
ethnologist working in a “village community” will use linguistic knowledge in order
