Approaches to Texts and media products: Framing, semiotics.
The assessment for this course requires you to write THREE short papers. There will be FOUR in total so you need to decide which you want to write; only submit three, there are no extra marks for submitting more than three!
The deadline for first of the Short Papers (SP1), on ‘media theory’, is approaching, check details here.
Chapter 13 “Media Content: Issues, Concepts and Methods of Analysis”, McQuail, D. (2010) Mass Communication Theory. SAGE, London.
A BBC podcast “In Our Time” on the notion of ‘truth’, and how philosophers have approached understanding it… (maybe they’ll give us some advice eh?)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss philosophical approaches to truth. Pontius Pilate famously asked: what is truth? In the twentieth century, the nature of truth became a subject of particular interest to philosophers, but they preferred to ask a slightly different question: what does it mean to say of any particular statement that it is true?
BBC Podcast ↗️
If you’re interested in reading more about the relationship between ‘truth’ and ‘news’ this chapter introduces some important ideas and gives us hints on how we can navigate the ‘information landscape’ safely (and with an increased degree of confidence!)
Chapter 7 of Worth, S. (1981) Studying Visual Communication. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia PA.
This is created from a scan of the book, there’s no reference list but I’ll add the references below once I get round to checking them. Also, be aware, this is pretty hard going at times, but interesting if you put in the effort to follow the arguments. Good luck!
If you’re not sure what I was rambling about when I mentioned the Citroen DS (as an object of semiotic analysis), have a look at this.