Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Yet this is not a very particular view of the description of the content, firmly
anchored in a certain tradition of indexation as is practiced in documentation
(scientific, technical and professional), and library sciences or archiving.
It should not be forgotten that content description also refers to analysis in the
sense of a genuine
professional assessment
of a piece of content, or in the sense of
an
interpretation
and
critical evaluation
of a given piece of content. We, for
instance, in the context of our teaching and research activities on audiovisual
semiotics, are particularly interested in the (hermeneutic) interpretation of cultural
representations, connotations or “preconceptions”, which lend an “added meaning”
to the anecdotal plane of the usually completely conventional images of the social
and natural world. These images make up the filmic material of amateur videos
produced by ordinary people to document their experiences, memories and emotions
[STO 10b].
[LEG 11a] offers a discussion of another issue for the systematic analysis of the
content of an open-ended audiovisual corpus, relating to its use in the context of a
program to evaluate, distribute and preserve a body of cultural heritage. The
example expounded in [LEG 11a] is of the assessment of community achievements
and practices (here, those of Quechua-speaking communities in Peru and Bolivia) in
accordance with an approach put forward by UNESCO
12
for its program to preserve
intangible cultural heritage. Two other very interesting examples are offered in
[DEP 11d; CHE 11b] which show thematic assessment in the context of the
pedagogical republication of a selection of audiovisual shots about a chosen subject,
including a set of basic references in accordance with the LOM
13
standard.
However, this type of analysis (i.e. analysis of the audiovisual content) is not
really the center of interest, for instance, of large banks of visual or sound data.
These databases are more interested in classifying their collections and making them
accessible, based on “formal” criteria such as
types of visual/sound objects
,
framing
,
shots
and
visual panning
to represent a filmed situation/object, the
duration
of a
visual or sound shot, etc. Such a classification can only be carried out by way of an
audiovisualdescription*
(to the detriment of a description of the content).
However, none of the approaches mentioned here genuinely takes account of the
circulation of content and resources on the Web, the fact that the Internet is an
intrinsically multilingual digital space, covering the most diverse contexts and uses
(http://www.cidoc-crm.org/scope.html) which provided the metalinguistic references needed
to describe the audiovisual content relating to cultural heritage.
12 This is the framework put forward by UNESCO for analyzing and evaluating intangible
cultural heritage: http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=fr&pg=00001.
13 In our case, this refers to the French version, LOMFR, of the
LearningObje
c
tsMetadata
.
