Atelier Sémiotique pour la constitution, description et (re-)publication de corpus audiovisuels enligne en Sciences Humaines et Sociales. – ASA-SHS

It is obvious nowadays that social sciences and humanities are using more and more massively the digital audiovisual technology for the constitution of their scientific and cultural heritage in form of more or less important (online) video-librairies, videotheques, etc. These tentatives have to be understood with respect to the constitution of digital scientific and cultural resources which could be reused (readapted, re-authored,) in specific contexts of uses and by specific user communities. Nevertheless, this vision is in contradiction with the fact that, actually, digital audiovisual resources are considered de facto in a very limited, even simplistic sense as a sort of a linear film which is diffused as such – like in the traditional model of communication dominating in the TV branch – without any consideration as far as its specific cognitive, semiotic or again rhetoric profile or content. With respect to this matter of fact, the ASA-SHS aims to introduce a semiotic approach in the processing of audiovisual resources either by the researchers themselves or by any other user community interested in the adaptation « versioning » of audiovisual corpora. Based on a seven years long experience in the constitution, indexing and publishing of more than 5000 hours of online videos in social and human sciences (viz. The Audiovisual Research Archive program of the French Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme – FMSH - in Paris) and in relying heavily on one of the French main traditions in language and communication sciences (i.e. discourse and narrative semiotics), the ASA-SHS project evolves in three main steps : 1/ based on initial user requirement analysis, three specific online audiovisual corpora in history, literature and archeology will be analyzed from a thematic, rhetoric and narrative point of view in following a general methodological framework of document description ; 2/ the results of this « field work » will be used for the development of specific tools necessary for the content processing of audiovisual resources (tools such as ontologies or thesaurus, stereotypic description models, publishing models, etc.) 3/ once these tools developed and validated, they will be integrated in a already existing digital environment (used by the FMSH for processing the audiovisual corpora) and experimentations will be undertaken a) on the three above quoted working corpora and b) on other, sometimes very different test corpora in order to show the interest of a semiotic (and cognitive) approach in processing audiovisual corpora either for research itself or for education (formal or informal one) or again for professional objectives. The basic objective of the ASA-SHS project is to sensibilise the SHS research community to adopt a more sophisticated vision of the very structural nature of audiovisual documents and to show them the concrete benefit of a semiotic approach in the processing (i.e. description, indexing, adapting and publishing) of chosen audiovisual corpora.