Digital Audiovisual Archives

Chapter 6

Academic Communication via Facebook and Twitter ¹

6.1. Introduction

Thanks to the ASW Studio (see [STO 11a]), we have a corpus of academic and cultural audiovisual resources which are analyzed and indexed in detail and which could be used by people such as researchers, teachers, students, parents, “beginners” in a specific area of study, media professionals and other specialists (i.e. in tourism or in cultural mediation) and so on. These analyzed corpora are published online in the context of the ASW-HSS¹ project as Web portals.

One of the initial issues in the ASW-HSS project concerns the dissemination and circulation of academic and/or cultural content in new information networks. However, how can we ensure that these audiovisual resources are made available to potentially interested audiences? Similarly, how can we ensure that these resources are shared by interested groups or communities while accounting for the fact that these groups are geographically and even temporarily sparsely “distributed”?

The use of social media, whose applications are based on the concept and technology of Web 2.0 that allows user generated exchange [KAP 11], seem to be a potential technological solution to this issue.

In this section, we will describe a series of concrete experiments with different Web 2.0 “applications” that aim to explore new means of circulating, providing access, and sharing academic and cultural information using the technical features offered by these applications. ...