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he publication of audiovisual archives asks many questions about the meaning of documents. Publishing a video archive on a Web site, for example, is a re-contextualisation. The loss of cultural references needed to understand a document implies the necessity to recontextualise documents. This means adding elements, such as titles, descriptions and other information. This paper analyzes the case of a video published by Ina on its Web platform Ina.fr and its Blog, the Blognote. The video, dated 1st January 1947, is a report envisioning a future when surveillance cameras would be installed on the streets in Paris. These two instances of publication offer two different views on the editorialization of video archives.

This paper deals with a major challenge linked to the collection of audiovisual documents within television and web archives. Looking for repeated sequences within a corpus of thousands of videos, we faced the fact that the footage we were looking for reveals itself to be reachable only as ghost data. In fact, any audiovisual sequence reused within different contexts exists conceptually as the repetition of one single visual unit, but also from the point of view of the metadata tagging its occurrences, each item is a distinct document. Like a ghost, the shot is there, scattered among different places, but the metadata cannot point us to the visual form repeated, despite its evidence to the human viewer. When facing large amounts of data, to relate a visual unit to its occurrences, data analysis techniques are needed. We describe our procedures of collection and annotation, and the solutions combining qualitative work and a computer-aided approach to face this main challenge, within the research project Crossing Borders Archives (CROBORA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does an image become an emblem representing an event? What is the process that allows a visual form to incarnate and reduce the complexity of an event? The paper explores the transformation of a stock shot (the lowering of the Union Jack in front of the European Commission) into a visual form representing the event of Brexit in its entirety. The image circulated widely on TV and on the Web between 2016 and 2021, as observed in the database of the research project CROBORA. We traced the genealogy of this sequence, employing diverse analytical perspectives and methods, including video detection tools. A Sherlock Holmes-style indexical investigation-as Carlo Ginzburg would say-that enabled us to study the path going from genesis to naturalization. Particularly, the circulation of the image is associated with the emotional effects it triggered. Interestingly, the sequence of the Union Jack that circulates most often in the European media is not that of the recording of a ceremony intentionally designed to decree the exit of the UK from the EU, but a generic shot realized several month before the Brexit referendum itself, thus anticipating the event and "premediating" it by waving its specter in front of the public. We show how its circulation creates an emblem by its vast mediatization through the screens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interfaces have partially replaced editors. They now administer and have industrialized the processes of content circulation. Web platforms mediatize cultural memory and one example of this is that of online audiovisual archives which are a paradigmatic case involving interfaces mediating our image of the past. Therefore, their role as an enunciative framework is clearly worthy of thought and study. We will thus use a semiotic approach based on the starting hypothesis that digital interfaces shape our belief systems through a discursive framing of content to which they give access. By analyzing two case studies, we will argue that the transparency of interfaces appears to recall the notion of "mechanical objectivity" and thus refashion the reliability of the archives. However, a final counter-analysis of a document read in the framework of an on-site consultation invites us to reshape our considerations and enlarge the perspective from semiotic visual analysis to include the social processes linked to the publication of digital heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on constitution of a cartography embracing the different approaches in the archival field accompanying the emergence of digital technology renewing the patrimonial trends of society.