Bruno Bachimont

Preserving interactive digital music: a report on the MUSTICA research initiative

The promise of recent technological and legislative developments to facilitate the digital dissemination of music is undermined by the lack of reliable means to preserve accurate copies of digital files: music that can be easily transmitted and played back today may not be retrievable tomorrow. Preserving interactive music compositions is particularly problematic, as their performance typically relies on a variety of specialized components. We describe the planned research activities of MUSTICA, an international team of archivists, information scientists, and musicologists that seeks to develop tools to guide the preservation and presentation of interactive digital musical compositions in accordance with the standards and strategies for electronic records preservation being developed by MUSTICAs parent research initiative, InterPARES 2.

Éléments pour une théorie opérationnelle de l'écriture numérique

Le passage a l’ecriture numerique est une reconfiguration qui agit sur la nature de la connaissance. Il y a un enjeu scientifique et operationnel a etudier cette ecriture renouvelee, en particulier pour la conception de systemes, l’analyse de pratiques et l’enseignement de l’ecriture numerique. Cet article y contribue sous la forme d’une etude theorique reposant sur une description a trois niveaux du numerique : theoretico-ideal, techno-applicatif et semio-rhetorique. Cette description est prolongee par une carte heuristique des fonctions de l’ecriture numerique et un repertoire de figures rhetoriques et de genres d’ecrits numeriques.

A Markovian approach for web user profiling and clustering

The objective of this paper is to propose an approach that extracts automatically web user profiling based on user navigation paths. Web user profiling consists of the best representative behaviors, represented by Markov models (MM). To achieve this objective, our approach is articulated around three notions: (1) Applying probabilistic exploration using Markov models. (2) Avoiding the problem of Markov model high-dimensionality and sparsity by clustering web documents, based on their content, before applying the Markov analysis. (3) Clustering Markov models, and extraction of their gravity centers. On the basis of these three notions, the approach makes possible the prediction of future states to be visited in k steps and navigation sessions monitoring, based on both content and traversed paths. The original application of the approach concerns the exploitation of multimedia archives in the perspective of the Copyright Deposit that preserves Frenchs WWW documents. The approach may be the exploitation tool for any web site.

Indexing and mining audiovisual data

In this paper we present a review of recent research and development works, which have been developed in the domain of indexing and mining audio-visual document. We first present the characteristics of the audio-visual documents and the outcomes of digitising this kind of documents. It raises several important issues concerning the new definition of what is a document, what is indexing and what are the numeric principles and technologies available for performing indexing and mining tasks. The analysis of these issue let us introduce the notion of temporal and multimedia objects, and the presentation of the three steps for indexing multimedia documents. It includes the clear distinction between descriptors and indexing. Finally we introduce the MPEG-7 paradigm, which sets the technical environment for developing indexing applications; Then we shortly review current developments, based on the text mining, the XML-Schema, and the event description interface approaches.

Intentions based authoring process from audiovisual resources

This paper introduces a novel approach to assist the author during the production process of new audiovisual documents from audiovisual archives. Our research relies on rhetorical tradition to relate authors intentions to forms and contents of target audiovisual discourse. We present the different levels of structure which are involved in the authoring process, together with their associated components (topic structure, intentional discourse structure, concrete discourse structure, discursive and narrative components). The paper specially focuses on reuse of audiovisual resources and shows how the context of their indexation can be articulated with the new publication context, so emphasizing the interest of multiple discursive structures interaction. We illustrate our approach with an example of TV news publication based on political TV archives.

A model and environment for improving multimedia scholarly reading practices

The evolution of multimedia document production and diffusion technologies has lead to a significant spread of knowledge in form of pictures and recordings. However, scholarly reading tasks are still principally performed on textual contents. We argue that this is due to a lack of critical and structured tools: (1) to handle the wide spectrum of interpretive operations involved by the polymorphous scholarly reading process; (2) to perform these operations on a heterogeneous multimedia corpus. This firstly calls for identifying fundamental document requirements for such reading practices. Then, we present a flexible model and a software environment which enable the reader to structure, annotate, link, fragment, compare, freely organise and spatially lay out documents, and to prepare the writing of their critical comment. We eventually discuss experiments with humanities scholars, and explore new academic reading practices which take advantage of document engineering principles such as multimedia document structuring, publication or sharing.

Modèle et outils documentaires multimédias pour la mise en tableau de partitions: Segmenter et restructurer, le cas de l'analyse paradigmatique

Cet article mene une reflexion sur l ’informatisation des pratiques musicologiques de segmentation et mise en tableau de partitions. Nous proposons un modele documentaire permettant la conduite d ’analyses multimedias (synchronisation), efficaces (maitrise de la spatialisation des contenus, segmentation, structuration logique et materielle) et semantiques (annotations, hyperliens), et presentons un environnement experimental qui l ’instrumente. Nous montrons en quoi la prise en compte du caractere constitutif des operations, gestes et outils materiels dans l ’activite analytique permet d ’explorer sous un angle nouveau des questions centrales telles que l ’articulation de l ’ecoute et du visuel dans la validation des resultats, la falsifiabilite et la publication de ceux-ci ou encore l ’ergonomie et l ’organisation de l ’espace de travail.

A web user profiling approach

People display regularities in almost everything they do. This paper proposes characteristics of an idealized algorithm that would allow an automatic extraction of web user profil based on user navigation paths. We describe a simple predictive approach with these characteristics and show its predictive accuracy on a large dataset from KDDCup web logs (a commercial web site), while using fewer computational and memory resources. To achieve this objective, our approach is articulated around three notions: (1) Applying probabilistic exploration using Markov models. (2) Avoiding the problem of Markov model high-dimensionality and sparsity by clustering web documents, based on their content, before applying the Markov analysis. (3) Clustering Markov models, and extraction of their gravity centers. On the basis of these three notions, the approach makes possible the prediction of future states to be visited in k steps and navigation sessions monitoring, based on both content and traversed paths.

An Approach for Designing Proofreading Views in Publishing Chains

Documentary production often involves a revising process in which documents need to be proofread. This important task faces new challenges when dealing with digital documents. Indeed, three features of digital writing are problematic: (1) documents evolve very frequently and cannot be proofread each time as a whole, (2) interactions provided by hypertexts make the task less efficient and (3) document repurposing increases the views of content to proofread. As an advanced digital writing technology, XML publishing chains are a relevant framework for studying proofreading of digital documents. This paper argues the need for proofreading views, which enable the comparison of two versions of the document based on a diff algorithm. It also proposes a design approach based on case studies within Scenari publishing chains, involving the annotation of content and the validation of modifications.

Document and archive: editing the past

Document engineering has a difficult task: to propose tools and methods to manipulate contents and make sense of them. This task is still harder when dealing with archive, insofar as document engineering has not only to provide tools for expressing sense but above all tools and methods to keep contents accessible in their integrity and intelligible according to their meaning. However, these objectives may be contradictory: access implies to transform contents to make them accessible through networks, tools and devices. Intelligibility may imply to adapt contents to the current state of knowledge and capacity of understanding. But, by doing that, can we still speak of authenticity, integrity, or even the identity of documents? Document engineering has provided powerful means to express meaning and to turn an intention into a semiotic expression. Document repurposing has become a usual way for exploiting libraries, archives, etc. By enabling to reuse a specific part of a given content, repurposing techniques allow to entirely renegotiate the meaning of this part by changing its context, its interactivity, in short the way people can consider this piece of content and interpret it. Put in this way, there could be an antinomy between archiving and document engineering. However, transforming document, editing content is an efficient way to keep them alive and compelling for people. Preserving contents does not consist in simply storing them but in actively transforming them to adapt them technically and keep them intelligible. Editing the past is then a new challenge, merging a content deontology with a document technology. This challenge implies to redefine some classical notions as authenticity and highlight the needs for new concepts and methods. Especially in a digital world, documents are permanently reconfigured by technical tools that produce variants, similar contents calling into question the usual definition the identity of documents. Editing the past calls for a new critics of variants.