Sosc4318: Modes of Communication - "Reading" Television (and "writing" hypertext)

Welcome to the Home Page for the group project of the Students of Sosc4318: Modes of Communication. The ostensible purpose of this project was to use four important theories to see if specific t.v. shows required the viewer to "read" the text. But the real purpose of this assignment, as far as I was concerned, was to ask students to work as a group on individual web pages which would be collected together as one document. As students studing hypertext, what better way to study the form than to have to write in this medium, and then assess its effectiveness? This assignment really is about "writing" hypertext.

In order to achieve some level of coherence, we decided to use the same template for all our pages, to use the same font (Arial), and type size, etc.; in short, to try to be as consistent as possible. We were also concerned about how we would use links: the challenge was to indicate to the reader where links were going, and why they should trust us in our choice of links--this was particularly important for external links. Each person (using one theory on one show) had to decide how to present their findings so that readers would want to follow any elaborative links they had. Then each show group, had to write a common home page. Some students wrote extra pages describing the theories we used, some students worked on the template, some on uploading the pages (a big job but fortunately we devised a file naming protocol before we started). Everyone was expected to sign their pages, and to acknowledge their sources. While some students in this class had web page experience, many didn't, but everyone completed the assignment--having a template page and using Dreamweaver helped.

The next stage of this assignment will be for the students to be objective about their work and provide a meta-analysis of the project's effectiveness. We all need to consider seriously what is involved in "writing" hypertext.

Mary-Louise Craven, Associate Prof., Communications Studies Program, Faculty of Arts, York University