Peter Stockinger 
Audiovisual Archives [PDF ebook] 
Digital Text and Discourse Analysis

Today, audiovisual archives and libraries have become very
popular especially in the field of collecting, preserving and
transmitting cultural heritage. However, the data in these archives
or libraries – videos, images, soundtracks, etc. – constitute as
such only potential cognitive resources for a given public (or
‘target community’). One of the most crucial issues of
digital audiovisual libraries is indeed to enable users to actively
appropriate audiovisual resources for their own concern (in
research, education or any other professional or non-professional
context). This means, an adaptation of the audiovisual data to the
specific needs of a user or user group can be represented by small
and closed ‘communities’ as well as by networks of open communities
around the globe.
‘Active appropriation’ is, basically speaking, the use of existing
digital audiovisual resources by users or user communities
according to their expectations, needs, interests or desires. This
process presupposes: 1) the definition and development of models or
‘scenarios’ of cognitive processing of videos by the user; 2) the
availability of tools necessary for defining, developing, reusing
and sharing meta-linguistic resources such as thesauruses,
ontologies or description models by users or user
communities.
Both aspects are central to the so-called semiotic turn in dealing
with digital (audiovisual) texts, corpora of texts or again entire
(audiovisual) archives and libraries. They demonstrate practically
and theoretically the well-known ‘from data to
metadata’ or ‘from (simple) information to (relevant)
knowledge’ problem, which obviously directly influences the
effective use, social impact and relevancy, and therefore also the
future, of digital knowledge archives. This book offers a
systematic, comprehensive approach to these questions from a
theoretical as well as practical point of view.
Contents
Part 1. The Practical, Technical and Theoretical Context
1. Analysis of an Audiovisual Resource.
2. The Audiovisual Semiotic Workshop (ASW) Studio – A Brief
Presentation.
3. A Concrete Example of a Model for Describing Audiovisual
Content.
4. Model of Description and Task of Analysis.
Part 2. Tasks in Analyzing an Audiovisual Corpus
5. The Analytical Task of ‘Describing the Knowledge
Object’.
6. The Analytical Task of ‘Contextualizing the Domain of
Knowledge’.
7. The Analytical Task of ‘Analyzing the Discourse Production
around a Subject’.
Part 3. Procedures of Description
8. Definition of the Domain of Knowledge and Configuration of the
Topical Structure.
9. The Procedure of Free Description of an Audiovisual
Corpus.
10. The Procedure of Controlled Description of an Audiovisual
Corpus.
Part 4. The ASW System of Metalinguistic Resources
11. An Overview of the ASW Metalinguistic Resources.
12. The Meta-lexicon Representing the ASW Universe of
Discourse.

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