Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Conclusion and Perspectives
Having come to the end of this topic, let us attempt to sum up, in a few
paragraphs, the main points and issues involved in our work.
Faced with the proliferation of digital audiovisual data, one of the crucially
important questions which arise is that of knowing how to turn these data into
(intellectual)
resources sui generis
. In other words, the fact that an audiovisual
document is available in digital form does not necessarily mean it becomes a
(cultural) good for a given audience!
Indeed, it is one thing to set up a digital video library (or media library)
containing a filmic or sound collection which, e.g. documents the activities of a
scientific or teaching institution; it is quite another to transform that collection into
resources for research, teaching, valorizing the institution's image, etc. These two
activities are completely dissimilar, and as long as we consider that mere digitization
and uploading of such documents is a satisfactory solution to the constitution,
communication and exploitation of bodies of knowledge heritage, we shall be
treading a false path.
In this topic, we have attempted to give both a theoretical
and
practical/technical
treatment of the question of
transforming
a “simple” piece of digital data into a
resource for a certain audience or user. We interpret this transformation as a process
of
appropriation
of a piece of digital data by the audience or individual user in
question. The appropriation may relate either to the materiality of an existing piece
of digital information (the user modifies this, by way of montage for example), or to
its content (
lato sensu
). This second form of appropriation is called
analysis*
in the
broadest sense of the term: the user - the audience - describes, interprets, comments
on, amends, adapts, etc., the content of the digital piece of data or a part thereof (a
sequence, a segment).
