Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In the context of our research on audiovisual archives, the approach considering
the text as a compositional entity reflects the fact that an audiovisual text considered
as a
coherent whole
may be broken down into units (sequences, segments, parts,
etc.) which in turn “behave” like “complete” audiovisual texts, thus forming
coherent wholes themselves. It also reflects the fact that an audiovisual text is not
necessarily physically delimited by the beginning and end of a “video” - a text in
the sense of an “information-carrying sign” [STO 99] may perfectly well take the
form of “snippets” of videos, which are physically separate but which form a whole,
semantically speaking. An audiovisual text on a digital support must therefore be
apprehended rather as a functional and hierarchically-integrated network of textual
parts which may in turn present themselves in the form of documents which in turn
are made up of different parts or sequences.
For instance, an audiovisual text in the sense of a knowledge resource for a given
audience may be an entire
film
, i.e. the recording of a class, or of an interview. It
may also be a
particular segment of that film
(i.e. a moment during a seminar or
class devoted to a particular theme, a subject). It may, finally, be a collection of
segments belonging to different “films” (of classes, seminars, etc.) but which,
together, form a new coherent whole from a thematic point of view or from the
perspective of a specific use (e.g. a set of segments dedicated to a particular
language “taken” from different films or recordings making up a
new, re-linearized
film
or a hypermedia
dossier
of film segments destined (e.g.) for pedagogical use.
Let us take from this that, as a structural whole, the (audiovisual) text should not
be reduced to a privileged material form - e.g. a book, a journal, a video, a photo,
etc. As a structural whole, an (audiovisual) text may be made up of a whole variety
and an infinite number of “privileged material forms” such as topics, photos or
films. In other words, a text in the sense of a structural whole may present itself in
the form of a corpus, a collection, an archive, a library, etc.
Finally, the text may also be understood in the sense of a
textscape
. Similar to
landscape
, a
textscape
means an “environment” (spatial, temporal, epistemological
and cultural) of information signs in which a social actor (an individual, a group, an
institution) is “swimming”, and which serve that actor as a source and as cognitive
resources for their various activities. We could, in fact, advance the viewpoint that
every social actor is characterized, among other factors, by different types or genres
of “landscapes”, of which the
textscape
is a part. Think of the urban space which
serves as a scene to the daily agitations of thousands of people. This space is, so to
speak, “decked out” with an enormous number of concrete texts in the form of
posters, signs, adverts, instructions, information boards, photos, spots, sound
supports and finally, mobile devices enabling us to complete this information
landscape with information from elsewhere in space or time. Each textual
representative part of such a
textscape
can be treated independently, as indeed is
