Valérie Beaudouin

Forms of contribution and contributors’ profiles: An automated textual analysis of amateur on line film critics

Based on an automated textual analysis of 40,000 film reviews posted by 18,000 French contributors on a web-based platform providing information on cinema, this article examines the relationship between the status of contributors (number of reviews posted, length of time of subscription to the site) and the type of reviews posted (choice of films, date of publication, models of argumentation, and modes of ratings). The study identifies two strongly contrasting reviewing models (film-centered and reception-centered) and shows that the regularity of practice significantly influences reviews, with regard to both form and content. The more often an author posts reviews, the closer the critique will be to the norms and formats of a professional critique. This finding challenges the idea that an online amateur critique can undermine the hierarchies of evaluation of cultural goods.

Creativity and Culture in Organizations

Organizational culture is averse to innovation. Some organizations are dedicated to creativity as a business (e.g. advertising, cinema or design): they nevertheless apply the classic production rules of labour division, specialism, incremental innovation and evaluation by demand. Creativity applied to organizations themselves, or to in-house processes, is tricky because organizations are by nature averse to change. There, creativity is confronted to a double bind: the injunction to set up something new but within the current rules and culture of the organization. Organizations are “installations” where the culture is distributed within three layers (built environment, embodied competences in members, institutional rules). The innovator jeopardizes the current state of things and hard-won compromises in this installation. That is an uncomfortable position and the fate of many innovators is tragic because they are troublemakers; often also they remain unrecognized. Unlike some other domains, creativity in organizations cannot be individual. We will describe in this chapter the nature of the double bind faced by creativity and innovation in large organizations and list some current solutions.

De l’utopie numérique à la pratique : le cas de l’annotation collaborative de films

Cet article porte sur un logiciel d’annotation collaborative de films. L’outil, Lignes de Temps, permet d’inscrire des commentaires dans le flux du film et d’echanger les annotations entre les differents participants. L’etude articule quatre niveaux d’attaque de la description de l’outil : les fonctionnalites logicielles, le discours philosophique qui l’accompagne, la semiotique visuelle de l’ecran et les premiers usages constates dans une phase d’experimentation originale. Il situe le discours d’escorte dans l’histoire de la pensee, debordant la stricte innovation technique. Il montre le caractere instituant du design visuel de l’ecran, en parallele de l’ideologie et des fonctionnalites logicielles qui le faconnent. Il confronte la promesse politique et cognitive aux premieres pratiques et retours d’usage releves dans le cadre de l’experimentation.