Managing Full-indexed Audiovisual Documents: A New Perspective for the Humanities

Abstract

The digitization of library documents and archives increasingly extends to audiovisual (AV) document repositories. As a consequence, new computer-aided techniques are being devised, providing opportunities for new uses of AV documents. As scholars work mainly by reading, annotating, reusing, and producing documents they are directly concerned by these changes. The first part of this article describes AV document use in the humanities, as well as the current and future influence computers might have on evolving practices. After establishing that “full-indexing” (indexing of the content for random access to any segment of an AV document) is a necessary condition if scholars are to develop new practices in using AV material, we will focus on the specific problems raised by AV indexing as opposed to text indexing, followed by a discussion of related AV indexing projects as well as standardization issues. The third part will propose a representation model for the description of AV material (AI-Strata) and an exchange format of AV annotations (AEDI), based on a free segmentation approach. An example of annotation is also provided. The last part is devoted to a discussion regarding potential long-term influences of digital AV indexing techniques on scholarly uses of AV documents.