TEXTS

Lecturer: Brian Morris.

Textual Analysis covers film, audio doco, policy documents, fiction, non-fiction etc. It can be hard to define. As Morris said about a U.S. Supreme Court Case, the judge exclaimed, ‘Porn. I don’t know what it is but I know it when I see it.’

Where does ‘textual analysis come from? It comes from content such as films, articles, topics and has a quantitive focus. For example, the Bobo Doll Experiment looked at the effects of child violence. Parents were given a Bobo doll and hit it. Their children watched this on a television screen. They were then told to entre the room and play with the Bobo Doll. They immediately began beating the doll. This mimicking of adult behaviour led researchers to believe there was a connection between onscreen violence and children’s violence. It’s a debate that is still being raged over today with uptake of video games.

Coming out of the Structuralist era of academia in post World War II to the mid 20^th Century, there was a turn against a particular idea of culture. Namely this was the consumerist culture or Pop Culture. Academics took a moral position that some culture was higher than others. For example, James Joyce Ulysses would’ve been regarded higher than say a Spiderman comic, which was seen as a lower culture. This brings us to our next topic, semiotics.

Semiotics

What is it?

‘Semiotics is the study of sign systems. It explores how words and other signs make meaning. It is anything that stands in for something other than itself. This lesson focuses primarily on linguistic signs. The word ‘semiotics’ dates back to ancient Greece, but its use in modern linguistics was propelled in the 19th century with the research of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure was a Swiss linguist who contributed greatly to the study of semiotics, also sometimes referred to as semiology.’ (http://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-semiotics-definition-examples.html)

What is a ‘text’?

Texts are the materials traces that are left of the practice of sense-making – the only empirical evidence we have of how other people make sense of the world. This is done by:

• vehicles for the production of cultural meaning (Sign systems)
• ‘texts’ in media, coummunications and cultural studies include cultural products, images, policy documents, social practices, institutions…
• Sites where we can see the social production of ideas
• Alan McKee ‘Textual analysis: a beginner’s guide (2003) – p12. ‘This , then, is why….make sense of the world.’ See (http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sbenus/Teaching/APTD/McKee_Ch1.pdf)

SOME PREVIOUS ACADEMIC MOTIVES FOR TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

‘textual analysis is an educated guess at some of the most likely interpretations that might be made of text’  Alan McKee.

Communication, academics argue, is a gamble. There is the possibility that the reader may not get the encoded meaning or understand it.  An example is ‘re-coding’. Ronald Reagan appropriated Bruce Springsteen ‘Born in the USA’ which was originally to communicate the working-man for his election campaign.

SEMIOTIC TRADITION OF ANALYSIS

Key starting terms:

• Sign, signifier, signified (referent)
• Denotation, connotation
• Codes
• ‘Myth’/ Ideology
  (See Daniel Chandler, semiotics for beginnershttp://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/)

A ‘sign’ can be visual, linguistic, aural, combination etc.

Signifier ‘a dog’ is a label.

Signified  what comes with that, associated with that label.

Connotation The colour ‘red’ connotes passion, anger, sexuality, communism, economic loss.

As example of constructing meaning, Morris showed a picture of children of different ages, a man and a woman and a dog sitting together picture. We immediately said ‘this is a family’. They maybe individuals but because they’re sitting close we imagine that they are a family. The dog is something that is part of the equation that we have constructed that is the ‘typical family’. We have attached meaning to these images.

When shown another image of people together all of similar age we knew immediately it was perhaps a band. We make these meanings through the use of labels we assign to each object and what it signifiers to us.

Commercials often use semiotics to sell an idea like the advertisement for cotton we see a father throwing a child into pool. While it emphasised pleasure it also sold the idea of white privilege, an exclusivity.

LIMITATIONS OF SEMIOTICS ANALYSES

‘…different modes allow to you to do different kinds of things, and not only allow you to do different kinds of things, but insist that different things are done.’ Gunther Kress, Social Semiotics: Key Figures, New Directions (79)

While we can separate images we can’t separate semitic elements when it comes to sound. Because sound is:

• Pervasive – can’t control what comes into our ears.
• Multidirectional – comes from everywhere
• Complexly layered –
• Prioritized by the ear – Janke Schaefer ‘Audio and Image’. Someone saying your name on the street.
• Sound is intimate and subjective.

These can be affect by Aural Semiotics, as Theo Van Leeuwen describes as  ‘Perspective’. The meaning of sound depends on the closeness. For example if the figure in the foreground the figure is the focus of interest. The ground sets the context or setting and the field is the background or ambient space. So we judge something based on a ‘Social Distance’.  For instance whispering (intimate relationship) to say using a microphone (public distance). If we look at broader sounds this takes us to looking at soundscape.

SOUNDSCAPE

It is a representation of a place or an environment that can be heard rather than what can be seen. Tony Gibbs, ‘The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Sound Design’. These are made up of ‘sonic components’ such as technical, emotional, pitch, volume. Looking below as this disturbing image we can already imagine the ‘soundscape’ here. The girl we might hear screaming above the other children’s cries (figure sound), the sound of footsteps, guns, radio chatter (ground sound) and sounds helicopters, explosions in the distance (field).

REFLECTIONS

Thinking about textual analysis and semiotics we do it on a daily basis without realising it. I make choices all the time if I’m going to read something based on whether it is ‘worthy’ (high culture) or not like a graphic novel (low culture). I deliberately eschew commercial television because I see it as low culture and feel morally superior when I engage in watching documentaries on enslavement of iphone workers in China a rather than my neighbour who wants to talk about My Kitchen rules.

In regards to semiotics I thought immediately of advertising as they are highly constructed images. I studied copywriting and it was always a challenge to seize an arresting image that maybe neutral to look at but then connate it with a tag line. I think this Evian ad best exemplifies what I mean.

Also, I thought about the last time I was at the pool. People leave their towels on a sun lounge to denote that this is their space. The towel is no longer a towel but a form of signifying ownership. I thought, as a funny video, I could go around town putting towels on things and saying they’re mine. Put the towel on somebody’s bike – ‘That’s mine now, thanks!’ or, upping the ante, on somebody – ‘You’re coming with me.’ I guess that’s not that far from the truth with wedding bands. ‘This maybe just a piece of round metal but once I put this on your finger…your life is over.’