Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
to be able to collect and classify data in the village parlance; he will use sociological
knowledge in order to collect, classify and interpret data relating to the use of
natural space in the village and to the construction of a common social space; he will
use musicological knowledge to collect, classify and interpret data relevant to the
villagers' musical culture, and so on. These “pearls” of knowledge may be more or
less implicit or, on the other hand, explicit; they may be appropriate or inappropriate
to a greater or lesser degree in relation to the object; they may evolve over time, in
accordance with the ethnologist's experiences, or those of his colleagues either
working with him or working on similar topics. Collection aside, the classification
and interpretation of the data of a field necessarily reflects a
conceptual schema
which guides, orients, and
frames
the work of the analyst.
The same is true for the description or indexation of a textual corpus or, in our
case, a corpus of audiovisual texts. The corpus is the field; the analyst may be a
researcher, an educator, someone with a professional or just a personal interest in
that field. However, we have invested a very great effort, both intellectual and
technical, to make this “field” work as rich as possible, but also as flexible and
adaptable to the analyst's interests and objectives as possible. This topic is dedicated
to this issue which, as we shall see, is a fairly complex one.
1.5.Ontheactivityofindexation
When we speak of indexation, we almost inevitably have a certain stereotyped
vision in mind of that activity as it is practiced in the context of documentation,
archiving or library cataloging.
In our approach,
cataloging
or
classifying
are only two particular activities in the
process of a user's appropriation of a textual object in general, and an audiovisual
one in particular, i.e. in the process of the progressive transformation of that object
into a
resource* sui generis
aimed at an audience, a particular group of users. The
entirety of that transformation is supported by a series of typical and recurring
activities. Those activities entail certain modifications to the
text
object:
- sometimes, it is a question of modifying the actual initial organization (formal,
physical, etc.) of the text (for instance, this is the case for the activities of
segmentation and extraction of
segments*
(passages) in a filmic object; it is also the
case for the activity of montage);
- sometimes, it is a question of adapting the “intellectual” content to the
limitations of a specific social context (this is especially so for the description of the
object in its entirety or of a part of it, for its enrichment by comments, aids,
references, etc.).
