Colloque Reimagining Annotation for Multimodal Cultural Heritage

Rapid advances in digital technology are constantly expanding the ways in which we can annotate multimodal documents, be they texts, images, videos, sounds, web pages or code. Cultural heritage institutions have embarked on ambitious campaigns to digitize their collections; at the same time, born digital heritage joins archival collections. The valorisation of digital heritage, especially audiovisual documents and multimodal corpora, is becoming a major issue for both cultural institutions and researchers. One of the answers consists of creating annotation interfaces or automating annotation thanks to computational techniques, both for close and / or distant viewing analysis.

Reimagining annotation for multimodal cultural heritage makes for an exciting and stimulating landscape, but also engenders a host of epistemological questions. How can we engage with and organize the informational hierarchies that emerge from these methods? What are the affordances and limits of close and distant reading methods and how can we articulate these two approaches? Faced with a multiplication of approaches and interfaces, how can we consolidate research and resources to encourage cumulative, collaborative work to occur? What becomes of the document’s ontology — notably in the context of time-based media and the analysis of creative processes — when it integrates a network of annotations, readings and decompositions?