Audiovisual Archives: Digital Text and Discourse Analysis

Chapter 5

The Analytical Task of “Describing the Knowledge Object”

 

5.1. Introduction

In this chapter, we shall more closely consider the analysis of the objects (situations, events, etc.) which make up the domain of knowledge thematized in an audiovisual text or corpus. As has already been said, this is one of the two aspects of so-called referential description* of the knowledge object dealt with in a text (in our case, an audiovisual text). The other side of referential description is the contextualization of the knowledge object, i.e. localizing it (spatio-temporally, socially, historically, etc.), which will be discussed in Chapter 6.

Also, let us not forget that referential description* constitutes one of the main tasks of a specific type of analysis of the audiovisual text, which we shall call thematic description* or description of the audiovisual content. The other tasks which make up the type of analysis called thematic description are as follows: the task of description of the discourse production* around a subject developed in the audiovisual text, the task of description of the audiovisual expression (or mise-enscène)* and/or verbal expression of the content and, finally, the task of production of a commentary by the analyst himself as regards his own description (see Chapter 4, Figure 4.4).

We shall begin this chapter by discussing a simple example of referential description (section 5.2). For this purpose, we shall return to the example developed in Chapter 3, relating ...