Audiovisual Archives: Digital Text and Discourse Analysis

Chapter 6

Chapter 6. The Analytical Task of “Contextualizing the Domain of Knowledge”

 

6.1. Introduction

Figures 3.3–3.5 (Chapter 3) show a second stage in the thematic description (that is, description of the content) of an audiovisual text or a specific passage therein: the contextualization of the knowledge object identified beforehand.

The term “contextualization” here is used in the sense of “referential contextualization”. This is the procedure which explicitizes the referential framework – the perimeter – of the knowledge object. In that sense, contextualization denotes a descriptive task, which, along with that of describing the knowledge object (see Chapter 5), constitutes the task of referential description*. Remember that the task of referential description, in turn, forms one of the four main tasks of a specific type of analysis of an audiovisual text, known as thematic description* (or description of the content) – the three others being the description of the discourse production* around a topic, the description of the audiovisual expression* and/or verbal expression of the topic and, finally, the meta-textual commentary (which, for instance, facilitates the explicitation of the framework – the “point of view” – of the content analysis itself).

To begin with, referential contextualization can be broken down into spatial contextualization and temporal contextualization . In our research regarding the analysis of audiovisual corpora, we focused particularly on these ...