La construction d'un corpus audiovisuel : choix des critères de pertinence et stratégies de légitimation des objets de la recherche

• Main Author: Bernard Papin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association Française des Enseignants et Chercheurs en Cinéma et Audiovisuel 2009-08-01
• Series: Mise au Point
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/map/1268

The group LU/TE (Lumières et television or The Enlightenment and Television) which was created in 2006 studies how the Age of the Enlightenment has been represented on French television from the 1950’s until today. The group brings together researchers from different fields (literature, semiology, audiovisual, reception studies…)who attempt to outline the posterity, between heritage and treason, of the eighteenth century Enlightenment through the images that we forge of them. The first task of the group was to establish a database common to all the researchers of the group. This first step immediately ran into a series of epistemological and methodological problems on the nature of which televisual objects to include and what their relevancy and their generic affiliation were. This led the group to question what they knew about the notions of works, authors, and genre concerning audiovisual media.First, the beginning of this research took into account the problem of the adaptation of literary works on the screen and was based on an ideology of cultural legitimation. But it soon became clear that such a refraction was limiting and that is was better to widen the research to all the televisual objects which bore witness more or less to the Age of the Enlightenment, to its works, but also to its knowledge, its values, and its beliefs in order to better understand the images that our modern era has constructed of them. It was thus important to take into account everything that television produces and also everything that is broadcasts. Thus, we widened the corpus to include not only documentary images and documentaries but also the retransmission of live shows and the broadcast of films. But very quickly we became aware of the fact that there was a risk of too much information some of which could also be negligible. Faced with this problem we decided to adopt criteria of consistent objectives which everyone accepted before we would allow a show into the corpus. These objectives concerned essentially the historical representation, the framework of the programming, the generic affiliation, the target audience etc. Our main concern was the independence of the designated object and of its communicational aim. But this is not easy to do as once more it is the very concept of audiovisual media, of author, and of genre that are put into question, challenged, and sometimes shaken up. Of course any research of consequence is built on the questioning of the certainties that are at its base.