What is a Text?
‘Text’ is an extremely broad term. So what is a Media Text? Is it something like an article in a magazine? Is it a webpage? Or is it something more like an advertisement? Or a film? On a very, very basic level – pretty much all of these things, and everything in between.
However, on a larger scale – a Media Text is so much more than an advertisement or a video or a photograph. A Media Text is something that communicates a plethora of ideas on many different facets and levels. It is something that becomes pivotal in representing a society’s culture, it’s views and it’s values – it becomes a cultural artefact that can be referenced through time.
A Media Text uses signs to illustrate ideas and meaning – Texts are hypersensual metaphors as we are able to recognise something that is disguised as something else. Texts play on our ability, as sentient beings, to recognise patterns and similarities between things; for example, we are able to recognise things such as different moods and emotions with different colours. A Texts ability to evoke these skills of recognition and feelings of familiarity, illustrates its complex nature and thus, its importance to be understood.
Examples
Words
Novels, articles, journals, short stories
Video
Films, television, home videos
Audio
Radio, electronic music, live bands, podcasts
Images
Photographs, drawings, animations, cartoons, comics
Performance
Song, dance, playing an instrument, live theatre
Note: the consideration of a work as a ‘text’ is subjective and consistently changing with the development of new technologies that give way to changing forms of media
Our aim is to examine, through the medium of a website, the process of text adaptation and its place in the 21st century. In our exploration, we will scratch the surface of the function of different textual mediums before delving into the topic of adaptations, with the specific example of the many transformations of William Shakespeare’s classic play, Romeo and Juliet.
We will analyse a number of adaptations of this play created in different mediums. In particular, we will identify the similarities and differences between the original and subsequent adaptations, consider how each adaptation reflects the time period in which it was made and dissect how the form of a text influences the conveyed meaning. Each text will be explored through the lens of semiotic and textual analysis learned from extensive research.
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