Theory: Doing Textual Analysis

After reading an article called 'Reading Media: Doing Textual Analysis' I understand the key concepts of analysing still and moving images.

SEMIOTICS 

> The study of signs.

'Micro' textual analysis refers to the study of specific elements of media texts that can be deconstructed through close reading. 
These micro features of texts are assessed in a thematic way to relate them to broader 'macro' conceptual models of media analysis. 

STILL IMAGE ANALYSIS

Media language describes the combination of written, verbal, non-verbal, aural & aesthetic communication & its instantaneous connection to meaning. 

Structuralism sought to identify structures that provide a network for meaning as located in texts. The focus is HOW meaning is constructed within a culture in a systemic way.

Media texts are combinations of lots of signs...
1) ICONIC SIGNS - direct resemblance to what they represent in the 'real world'
2) SYMBOLIC SIGNS - have a completely arbitrary / 'made-up' cultural connection to what they represent - we could change the meaning if we wanted to
3) INDEXICAL SIGNS - Have some kind of indirect or suggestive relationship to what they represent 

MOVING IMAGE ANALYSIS

There are 4 key elements...

• camera... position, angle, movement, framing, lens choice
• editing... intended to seem 'invisible' - helps convey meaning through the manipulation of time
• sound... diegetic & non-diegetic
• mise-en-scene...  overall atmosphere created by lighting, costume, setting and effects

GENRE


"A genre is a category of media text that comes to be recognizable through its conventions."


REPRESENTATION


"The media do not offer us a transparent 'window' of the world, but a mediated version of the world." - Buckingham 2003: 57)


- the sum of various 'micro' parts and relates to broader theories of collective identity, cultivation and ideology


"Meaning is a social production, a practice. The world has to be made to mean. Language and symbolization is the means by which meaning is produced." - Hall 1980: 67


NARRATIVE

• Narrative analysis unpicks the ways that texts organize events into sequences and how these acts of sequencing become conventional.
• Over time, conventional ways of telling stories cross over from one form to another in a process of 'remediation'.
• Propp and Todorov are theorists who produced morphologies and typologies of how fictional stories tend to deploy a stock of repeated 'character types' and fit a structure beginning with equilibrium, moving through disruption and ending with a new equilibrium