This essential textbook provides a clear and authoritative introduction to qualitative and quantitative methods for studying media and communication. Written by two highly experienced researchers, the book draws on a wide range of media and communication research to introduce students to the relative strengths of the different research approaches. Beginning with an overview of the changing contexts and trends in media and communication research approaches, the book demystifies 'research' and the 'research process' by offering practical and accessible guidance on how to design, plan and carry out successful research projects in media and communication. This is an indispensable text for all students of media and communication studies, particularly those undertaking their own research projects or taking modules in research methods.

There is now a long tradition of academic literature in media studies and criminology that has analysed how we come to think about crime, deviance and punishment. This book for the first time deals specifically with the role of language in this process, showing how critical linguistic analysis can provide further crucial insights into media representations of crime and criminals. Through case studies the book develops a toolkit for the analysis of language and images in examples taken from a range of media. The Language of Crimeand Deviance covers spoken, written and visual media discourses and focuses on a number of specific areas of crime and criminal justice, including media constructions of young people and women; media and the police, 'reality crime shows; corporate crime; prison and drugs.It is therefore a welcome and valuable contribution to the fields of linguistics, criminology, media and cultural studies.

This book analyses war monuments by developing a multimodal social-semiotic approach to understand how they communicate as three-dimensional objects. The book provides a practical tool-kit approach to how critical multimodal social semiotics should be done through visual, textual and material analysis. It ties this material analysis into the social and political contexts of production. Using examples across the 20th and 21st century the book's chapters offer a way of analysing the way that monument designers have used specific semiotic choices in terms of things like iconography, objects, shape, form, angularity, height, materials and surface realisation to place representations of war in public places across Britain. This social-semiotic approach to the study of war monuments serves three innovative purposes. First, it provides a contribution to the work on the ideological representations of war in Media and Cultural Studies and in Critical Discourse Analysis applied specifically to more banal realisations of discourse. Second, it responds to calls by historians for innovative ways to study war commemoration by providing an approach that offers both specific analysis of the objects and attends to matters of design. Thirdly, following in the relatively recent tradition of multimodal analysis, the arguments draw on the ideas of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001), adapting and extending their theories and models to the analysis of British commemorative war monuments, in order to develop a multimodal framework for the analysis of three dimensional objects.

This book provides a range of highly accessible approaches from Discourse Studies for analyzing legal language in legislation, documents, proceedings and in news media reporting. In this insightful volume, scholars from both Law and Linguistics come together to provide a range of approaches from Discourse Studies for analyzing legal language in legislation, documents, proceedings and in news media reporting. The book begins with tackling exactly why such approaches are hugely helpful and valuable for understanding the nature of legal language and how it is used. The chapters, written in an accessible manner, show how discourse analysis can be used to throw light on the ideas and values which can be buried in legal language. The book provides a valuable resource for researchers wishing to carry out their own research or for use in teaching. The Law and Critical Discourse Studies will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of law, language and linguistics, discourse studies, sociology, and media and cultural studies.This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Discourse Studies.

In 2008, the editors published a well-cited journal paper arguing that while scholarly work on media representations of environmental issues had made substantial progress in textual analysis there had been much less work on visual representations. This is surprising given the increasingly visual nature of media and communication, and in light of emerging evidence that the environment is visualized through the use of increasingly symbolic and iconic images. Addressing these matters, this volume marks out the present state of the field and contains chapters that represent fresh and exciting high quality scholarly work now emerging on visual environmental communication. These include a range of fascinating and often alarming topics which draw on a variety of methods and forms of visual communication. The book demonstrates that research needs to think much more widely about what we mean by the 'visual' which plays a massive yet under-researched role in the politics and ideology of public understanding and misunderstanding of and the environment and environmental problems. The book is of relevance to students and researchers in media and communication studies, cultural studies, film and visual studies, geography, sociology, politics and other disciplines with an interest in the politics of visual environmental communication. This book was published as a special issue of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture.

Featuring a wide range of exercises, examples, and images, this textbook provides a practical way of analyzing the discourses of the global media industries. Building on a comprehensive introduction to the history and theory of global media communication, specific case studies of lifestyle and entertainment media are explored with examples from films, global women's magazines, Vietnamese news reporting and computer war games. Finally, this book investigates how global media communication is produced, looking at the formats, languages and images used in creating media materials, both globally and in localized forms. At a time when the media is becoming increasingly global, often with the same films, news and television programmes shown all over the world; Global Media Discourse provides an accessible, lively introduction into how globalization is changing the language and communicative practices of the media. Integrating a range of approaches, including political economy, discourse analysis and ethnography, this book will be of particular interest to students of media and communication studies, applied linguistics, and (critical) discourse analysis.

Featuring a wide range of exercises, examples, and images, this textbook provides a practical way of analysing the discourses of the global media industries. Building on a comprehensive introduction to the history and theory of global media communication, specific case studies of lifestyle and entertainment media are explored with examples from films, global women's magazines, Vietnamese news reporting and computer war games. Finally this book investigates how global media communication is produced, looking at the formats, languages and images used in creating media materials, both globally and in localised forms.

At a time when the media is becoming increasingly global, often with the same films, news and television programmes shown all over the world; Global Media Discourse provides an accessible, lively introduction into how globalisation is changing the language and communicative practices of the media. Integrating a range of approaches, including political economy, discourse analysis and ethnography, this book will be of particular interest to students of media and communication studies, applied linguistics, and (critical) discourse analysis.

Sarah Niblock and David Machin bring us a much needed book that bridges the gap between journalistic theory and practice. The authors respond to a recent and growing recognition in academia and indeed journalism of the importance of reflective practice based on consultation of the sociological literature on journalism and the media industry. There is a distinct lack of up-to-date publications on journalists at work, the most recent ethnographies having been published in the 1980s. This book will provide detailed ethnographies of eight different news production settings. Each chapter follows two news workers through their daily routines, detailing the exact nature of their jobs, the constraints they may encounter, how they cope with those constraints and finally to what extent their work can be understood through reference to the sociological theory and vice versa. Chapters include "News agencies: something to please everyone," "The roving reporter," "Photojournalism" and "The new reporter learning the ropes."
The book is set in context by two opening chapters on the "History of News" and the "Sociology of News gathering." The former holds the premise that it is impossible to understand journalistic practice, the workings of the industry, or news values and the morality of "objectivity" without looking at the way that the news industry has grown up over the past 100 or so years. The emphasis of this chapter is very much on looking forward to the ethnographies which follow. "Sociology of news gathering" similarly details the sociological theory relevant to the ensuing chapters, theories which will be constantly referred back to throughout the course of the book. The section will becomprised of a review of the sociological literature on news agencies, news gathering, news values, the public sphere and tabloidisation.
This book will be an invaluable and much-needed real-life account of reporting in the context of contemporary newsrooms. For students taking practical units in news reporting, sub-editing and even law and ethics, this text will provide the type of concrete examples they will need to consolidate their skills-based training. The ethnographies will provide case-studies against which they can compare their experiences. Most journalism and media courses require their students to complete work-based assignments which are assessed through reflective reports. This book will help students prepare for their placements by gaining a strong sense of the working environment and tasks. It will also help students raise questions about their placements to form the basis of their reports. These reports expect them to synthesise the practice of journalism with the critical accounts of the profession by academics. No other journalism text does this.

In 2008, the editors published a well-cited journal paper arguing that while scholarly work on media representations of environmental issues had made substantial progress in textual analysis there had been much less work on visual representations. This is surprising given the increasingly visual nature of media and communication, and in light of emerging evidence that the environment is visualized through the use of increasingly symbolic and iconic images.

Addressing these matters, this volume marks out the present state of the field and contains chapters that represent fresh and exciting high quality scholarly work now emerging on visual environmental communication. These include a range of fascinating and often alarming topics which draw on a variety of methods and forms of visual communication. The book demonstrates that research needs to think much more widely about what we mean by the visual which plays a massive yet under-researched role in the politics and ideology of public understanding and misunderstanding of and the environment and environmental problems.

The book is of relevance to students and researchers in media and communication studies, cultural studies, film and visual studies, geography, sociology, politics and other disciplines with an interest in the politics of visual environmental communication.

This book was published as a special issue of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture."

Advances in Critical Discourse Studies collects ground-breaking scholarship and cutting-edge research which reflects significant shifts in Critical Discourse Studies, exploring the field from theoretical, analytic and methodological perspectives. Innovative chapters analyse a diverse range of discourses including journalism, mass media, political communication, policy documents, interviews, photographic archive and official bodies. The chapters in Part I explore Critical Discourse Studies from the point of view of history, memory, identity politics, and discourse, analysing salient examples of how memory and recollection of the past shapes understandings and narratives of the present, and visions of future societies. Part II explores problem-oriented analysis in Critical Discourse Studies and examines the roles that discourse plays in the formation, perpetuation and transformation of class relations. Finally, Part III explores a methodological issue by looking at the benefits of reinforcing fieldwork and ethnographic analysis in Critical Discourse Studies. The case studies throughout the book demonstrate that analytic research contributes significantly to the in-depth and in-situ research of a variety of increasingly complex social, historical, political and economic contexts. This book was originally published as three special issues of the journal Critical Discourse Studies.

Sarah Niblock and David Machin bring us a much needed book that bridges the gap between journalistic theory and practice. The authors respond to a recent and growing recognition in academia and indeed journalism of the importance of reflective practice based on consultation of the sociological literature on journalism and the media industry. There is a distinct lack of up-to-date publications on journalists at work, the most recent ethnographies having been published in the 1980s. This book will provide detailed ethnographies of eight different news production settings. Each chapter follows two news workers through their daily routines, detailing the exact nature of their jobs, the constraints they may encounter, how they cope with those constraints and finally to what extent their work can be understood through reference to the sociological theory and vice versa. Chapters include "News agencies: something to please everyone," "The roving reporter," "Photojournalism" and "The new reporter learning the ropes."
The book is set in context by two opening chapters on the "History of News" and the "Sociology of News gathering." The former holds the premise that it is impossible to understand journalistic practice, the workings of the industry, or news values and the morality of "objectivity" without looking at the way that the news industry has grown up over the past 100 or so years. The emphasis of this chapter is very much on looking forward to the ethnographies which follow. "Sociology of news gathering" similarly details the sociological theory relevant to the ensuing chapters, theories which will be constantly referred back to throughout the course of the book. The section will becomprised of a review of the sociological literature on news agencies, news gathering, news values, the public sphere and tabloidisation.
This book will be an invaluable and much-needed real-life account of reporting in the context of contemporary newsrooms. For students taking practical units in news reporting, sub-editing and even law and ethics, this text will provide the type of concrete examples they will need to consolidate their skills-based training. The ethnographies will provide case-studies against which they can compare their experiences. Most journalism and media courses require their students to complete work-based assignments which are assessed through reflective reports. This book will help students prepare for their placements by gaining a strong sense of the working environment and tasks. It will also help students raise questions about their placements to form the basis of their reports. These reports expect them to synthesise the practice of journalism with the critical accounts of the profession by academics. No other journalism text does this.

Popular music is far more than just songs we listen to; its meanings are also in album covers, lyrics, subcultures, voices and video soundscapes. Like language these elements can be used to communicate complex cultural ideas, values, concepts and identities. Analysing Popular Music is a lively look at the semiotic resources found in the sounds, visuals and words that comprise the 'code book' of popular music. It explains exactly how popular music comes to mean so much. Packed with examples, exercises and a glossary, this book provides the reader with the knowledge and skills they need to carry out their own analyses of songs, soundtracks, lyrics and album covers. Written for students with no prior musical knowledge, Analysing Popular Music is the perfect toolkit for students in sociology, media and communication studies to analyse, understand - and celebrate - popular music.

Introduction to Multimodal Analysis is a unique and accessible textbook that critically explains this ground-breaking approach to visual analysis. Now thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition reflects the most recent developments in theory and shifts in communication, outlining the tools for analysis and providing a clear model that students can follow. Chapters on colour, typography, framing and composition contain fresh, contemporary examples, ranging from product packaging and website layouts to film adverts and public spaces, showing how design elements make up a visual language that is used to communicate with the viewer. The book also includes two new chapters on texture and diagrams, as well as a helpful image index so students can clearly understand how images and multimodal texts can be analysed from different perspectives. Featuring chapter summaries, student activities and a companion website hosting all images in full colour, this new edition remains an essential guide for students studying multimodality within visual communication in linguistics, media and cultural studies, critical discourse analysis or journalism studies.

Visual communication shapes our perceptions and experiences of the world. This is not only a question of photographs or video, but also the design of websites, the use of data visualization software, the branding of packaging, and even the design of buildings and furniture. Doing Visual Analysis: From Theory to Practice provides a concrete set of tools to research and analyse this wide range of visual data. Showing students how to apply the right mix of methods to their own research projects, it equips them with the skills to break down and analyse the range of contemporary visual communication. The book: Provides examples of how and where certain tools can be used in a project or dissertation Discusses the type of research questions best suited to different tools and methods Shows students how to mix approaches and use tools alongside other methods, such as content analysis or interviews Doing Visual Analysis is an essential companion for students and researchers of visual data across the social sciences.

Introduction to Multimodal Analysis is a unique and accessible textbook that critically explains this ground-breaking approach to visual analysis. Now thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition reflects the most recent developments in theory and shifts in communication, outlining the tools for analysis and providing a clear model that students can follow. Chapters on colour, typography, framing and composition contain fresh, contemporary examples, ranging from product packaging and website layouts to film adverts and public spaces, showing how design elements make up a visual language that is used to communicate with the viewer. The book also includes two new chapters on texture and diagrams, as well as a helpful image index so students can clearly understand how images and multimodal texts can be analysed from different perspectives. Featuring chapter summaries, student activities and a companion website hosting all images in full colour, this new edition remains an essential guide for students studying multimodality within visual communication in linguistics, media and cultural studies, critical discourse analysis or journalism studies.

This book analyses war monuments by developing a multimodal social-semiotic approach to understand how they communicate as three-dimensional objects. The book provides a practical tool-kit approach to how critical multimodal social semiotics should be done through visual, textual and material analysis. It ties this material analysis into the social and political contexts of production. Using examples across the 20th and 21st century the book's chapters offer a way of analysing the way that monument designers have used specific semiotic choices in terms of things like iconography, objects, shape, form, angularity, height, materials and surface realisation to place representations of war in public places across Britain. This social-semiotic approach to the study of war monuments serves three innovative purposes. First, it provides a contribution to the work on the ideological representations of war in Media and Cultural Studies and in Critical Discourse Analysis applied specifically to more banal realisations of discourse. Second, it responds to calls by historians for innovative ways to study war commemoration by providing an approach that offers both specific analysis of the objects and attends to matters of design. Thirdly, following in the relatively recent tradition of multimodal analysis, the arguments draw on the ideas of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001), adapting and extending their theories and models to the analysis of British commemorative war monuments, in order to develop a multimodal framework for the analysis of three dimensional objects.

This title looks at the study of crime and deviance through written, spoken and visual representation. There is now a long tradition of academic literature analysing the way our societies come to think about and define crime and the important part that the media play in this process. This book for the first time deals specifically with the role of language in representations and constructions of crime, deviance and punishment in the media. Combining theoretical perspectives from linguistics, sociology, criminology and media studies, it provides a toolkit for the analysis of language and images in examples across a range of media. Including critical and multimodal discourse analysis, emphasis is placed on practically demonstrating the tools that can be used for the linguistic analysis of media representations of crime and deviance. It covers both spoken and written discourse and focuses on a number of specific areas of crime and criminal justice, including young people and women, the way the media represent criminal justice agencies, corporate crime, and crime and deviance in popular culture. It is a welcome and valuable resource for students and academics in linguistics, media studies, criminology and sociology.