Audiovisual Archives: Digital Text and Discourse Analysis

Chapter 2

The Audiovisual Semiotic Workshop (ASW) Studio – A Brief Presentation

 

2.1. A working environment for analyzing corpora of audiovisual texts

Before discussing the issues relating to the conception and development of models for describing audiovisual corpora using a metalanguage of description, we shall give a brief overview of the working environment of an analyst of audiovisual corpora – an environment called the ASW Studio¹ (for a detailed presentation of the ASW Studio, see [STO 11a]).

The ASW Studio relies, on the one hand, on an overall vision of the activities which make up the process of appropriation of an audiovisual text by the analyst for a specifically-targeted user and, on the other hand, on the semiotic approach to the (in our case, audiovisual) text, which we described briefly in the first chapter of this book (also see [STO 03]).

The representation and simulation of the activities of appropriation, i.e. qualitative transformation of an audiovisual text into a resource, an asset for a specific audience, takes the shape of one or more scenarios of activities guided by models of description (see also [STO 11a]). The basic scenario of activities being that which defines the main stages of a project of production, analysis and diffusion of a body of knowledge heritage [STO 11e], the scenario defining a project to qualitatively transform an audiovisual text into a resource per se (an intellectual asset) for a given audience is that which defines the main activities ...