Meeting with Alison!

I have just been to see Alison to finalise the idea with her and she seemed very happy with it. The proposed idea if everyone agrees to it is looking at diachronic change in university media. Using Redbrick's, (if Liam is able to get hold of old ones) we need to pick around ten copies from throughout the time it has been published. Alison said these should preferably include really old ones if we can find them as this would make the project fascinating, but if not even ones from the past ten years would show a lot of changes linguistically. To make sure the project is measurable, we need to look at one section in particular of each newspaper (Alison suggested the editorial) to analyse linguistic content. This will be the main focus of the project! In addition to this we could also look at the first double page spread of each paper to see how the layout and features have changed due to technology etc. In the most recent Redbrick's there are twitter feeds and a 'news feed' layout which would be very different to older publications.

Basically, the next steps are to find the newspapers because they should be there somewhere, revise the GLA and get started in dividing up the work.

If we have trouble finding the newspapers the other option would be to do the same project but with prospectuses instead, OR analysing both side by side,which would mean half the group looking at Redbrick's and half at prospectuses from the same years (This could be a lot of work though).

I've tried to write this as clearly as possible but if I've missed anything out or there is something you don't understand then let me know :) Hope this makes everyone feel better about the project in general and that everyone is happier as we have a very clear focus.

Week Five

Following our voice recorded feedback off Alison, our group met up and refined our ideas into the form of an e-mail that we sent to Alison:

"Dear Dr. Sealey,

Following our group meeting today we have come up with some more refined ideas. I have included a rough summary for each idea, please could we have some feedback on them to see if any of them are viable topics?

Main idea:
1. Student communication within the university
- We will look at three multimedia texts including Redbrick, Facebook and Guild flyers (back-up if the other two texts do not give enough linguistic data)
- We would then answer these mini questions within this topic area, possibly having each member of the group assigned to a particular question:
- Is there evidence of colloquial language in the Redbrick newspaper?
-How does the University’s Facebook page differ in traditional linguistic choices?
- Is there evidence that Facebook has changed the punctuation and layout of the newspaper to something more modern?
-Does the traditional written formal prestige of the Redbrick newspaper still remain in its place?
- A questionnaire to investigate the social attitudes and preferences towards the two mediums of communication.
Together we can form the information into a conclusion, answering the final main question of whether technology and changing social attitudes have influenced the linguistic choices of Redbrick newspaper. The measurable factors would be the questionnaire results and the number of instances of particular lexical features.

Back up ideas:
2. Persuasive discourse in political speeches or political discourse in the media

3. Comparing persuasive discourse between subject departments in the University prospectus

Thank you,
Group 6"

She then gave us further points that we need to refine a little more. To resolve this we will use Alison's office hours on Thursday, after which we will hopefully have our idea set in stone and we can then utilise reading week to kick start the project.

Our Group Learning Agreement and Proposal!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FhyEXRLoQxCohvCvP5vZvMWAwAI1A7e1M5mOP5GJ9gA/edit?hl=en_US#

Our Idea...

As a group we had a lot of ideas surrounding our topic, and all of our research pointed us in many different directions, but after much deliberating Jess came up with an idea that incorporated most of our previous research and ideas, while being more focused in one direction.

How does power work in different forms of University communication with students, and how the multimodality of texts in the context of online platforms/ 'computer mediated communication' alters the power in them.

So, we could do the question on power in the texts and then consider whether things like being able to comment on facebook versions of posters lessen the social and power distance between author and audience. This would work for newspaper and email.                      

This is based on a journal saying 'Poststructuralist views of language emerge from media and cultural studies and emphasize the broader semiotic landscape of which language forms part.

(Kramsch et al., 2000). A text, in this view, is actually a multimodal artifact that encompasses a broad array of signifiers, including typographical conventions, layout, photographs, graphs, diagrams, and other media (see Graddol, 1994). Authorship loses significance due to the unstable, partial, and multiple forms of meaning embedded in multivocal, multimodal artifacts (Nystrand et al., 1993), and readers are thus left to deconstruct the meaning of text independent of what an author may have intended. With this as a backdrop, we will now examine linguistic and semiotic interaction in three of the most popular types of Web 2.0 media—blogs, wikis, and social network sites—with particular attention to how they reshape concepts of audience, authorship, and artifact.'

SO BASICALLY TALKING ABOUT HOW POWER INEQUALITY IS LESS SET IN STONE AS CONTINUUM BETWEEN AUTHOR AND AUDIENCE IN ONLINE SOURCES.

We could also use Fairclough's ideas of:
-Power in discourse: the ways in which power is manifested in situations through language.
-Power behind discourse: the focus on the social and ideological reasons behind the enhancement of power.

Week Two

Jess, Liam, Anna, Ellie and myself all met up today to discuss topic ideas for the project. We have decided to research how the University relays information to its students. To analyse this we are considering multimedia texts including; Redbrick Newspaper, e-mails (between us and lecturers), careers leaflets and the Univeristy's Facebook and Twitter pages. These types of media will gives us different ways in which information is conveyed, as well as fitting in nicely with the theme of multimedia in this module.

We are all going to find; two pieces of media and two pieces of research or studies each to bring to our next meeting on Monday.

We haven't got a solid question or particular linguistic device to focus on as of yet. But we have decided that as we do our initial research in the next few days, that we will be able to find a focus in time for week 3 and the formal proposal.

Week One

The members of our group are:

Ellie Moss
Kate Marsh
Liam Charles
Anna Taylor
Jessica Wright

We are all meeting on Friday to discuss our ideas!