Editorialization as it exists in an online context refers to all operations of organization and structuring of content on the web, and more broadly in the digital environment.
Whereas in French, this term has acquired a broader meaning through its use, particularly in relation to digital culture and new forms of knowledge production.
[3] In 2007, the term « editorialization » is used by Bruno Bachimont who defines it as a « process that consists in enlisting resources for inclusion in a new publication ».
In the same year, following the tradition of revitalizing document research, Manuel Zacklad (2007)[5] defines editorialization as a particular type of documentarisation.
Documentarisation can be part of a sophisticated division of labor, in both traditional and web environments, which contains different stages: authorial documentarisation (an author's work on the medium to give it an internal coherence), editorial (inclusion in a genre and a collection), broadcast (aimed at facilitating material access) and appropriation (produced by readers and commentators).
According to this typology, editorialization is a kind of documentarisation aimed at rendering several documents more consistent as part of a collection, a portal, a website, a blog.
It is by entering into the perspective initiated by Bachimont, that from 2008, the research laboratory on the new forms of editorialization at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Paris Nord - MSH Paris Nord[6] adjusts the definition by applying it to content, which develops directly in the digital environment.
[7] Since 2008, the concept of editorialization has been largely theorized in Francophone research, notably through the seminar "Digital Writing and Editorialization"[8] founded in 2008 by Marcello Vitali-Rosati, Gérard Wormser, Nicolas Sauret and Anne-Laure Brisac[3] and joined in 2015 by a team from the Dicen-IDF laboratory led by Louise Merzeau.
In April 2015, Jérôme Valluy listed 70 academic publications explicitly dealing with the concept in a selective bibliography.
He proceeds, at the same time, by identifying different natures of editorialization while distinguishing the notion of other related concepts.
Since the digital environment exceeds the framework of the web in the present time, Marcello Vitali-Rosati notes that editorialization "tends to act on reality rather than representing it [13]».
The main difference between edition and editorialization consists in the latter's focus on the technological devices that determine the context of a content and its accessibility.
In this process, it is not only a matter of choosing, legitimizing, formatting and distributing content, but also of thinking about all the techniques that we will use or create to do so, as well as the circulation environments produced by the digital space.
The editorialization of online videos supposes a valuing of the contents, namely, to publish a well referenced catalog, to structure the resources of a site by themes, and to contextualize the audio-visual documents in an exhaustive way thus animating a whole network.
The added value, a concept developed by Jacques Chaumier and Eric Sutter, then makes it possible to structure the offer and consequently, to facilitate access to documents and to respond to specific requests.