The semiotic turn in digital archives and libraries

Abstract

To-day, we witness the massive digitization of any kind of media objects, the storing and diffusion of it in form of digital (multimedia) libraries, archives or any other form of digital “(multimedia) information spaces”. The general policy is to make available the enormous quantities of media data in form of relevant (critical) knowledge or knowledge resources for a target public – a person, a social group, an institution (this policy underlies the shift from an “information society to a knowledge society” as proclaimed, for instance, in the Lisbon 2001 Declaration or again in the actual Europe 2020 program). However if we want to progress in this historically and culturally certainly highly exciting and innovative direction, a series of serious – technical, social and scientific – problems has to be solved. One of the most complex ones is without any doubt the question of how to process the symbolic or the meaning of (digital) media data with respect to a given – analogically speaking - market place of meaning production, sharing and consumption (potential users of meaning, cultural expectations of meaning, needs and desires of meaning, uses and exploitations of meaning, added value of specific forms of meaning …). Indeed: … a (digital) media data (a still image, a video, a sound record, an oral record, a printed document, …) is not in itself already a genuine cognitive resource for a given “reader” or “community of readers”, that will say a relevant “means” for an agent to solve a problem, to answer a question or again to satisfy a (personal or collective) goal or a need. A digital media data is, in other terms, only a potential cognitive resource. It has to “undergo” more or less significant qualitative transformations in order to become a user or a user community relevant one. These qualitative transformations are performed through series of concrete operations such as the constitution and classification of relevant corpora of digital records, the description and indexing of records, the processing of digital data (segmentation, tagging, linking, montage, …), the (cultural, linguistic) versioning (commenting, translating, …) of given source records or again the (re-)publishing of digital records. These and other operations constitute what we call the semiotic processing of (digital) media objects, corpora of (digital) media objects or again entire archives and libraries. They demonstrate practically and theoretically the well-known “from data to meta-data” or the “from (simple) information to (relevant) knowledge” problem – problem that obviously determines the effective use and also the future of digital knowledge archives. In short, the central question here is that of the semiotic structure of (digital) media data, i.e. the structural organization of (digital) media data, their status and function(s) for a given user or community of users and of how to deal with them, how to work concretely with them in order to achieve not only theoretical but also practical - educational, economical or other - objectives.