Lecture Three: What is Text?

Guest speaker Skye Doherty presented a lecture on text this week. I also learned what a 'stand-first' was, which is helpful. The lecture was all about text, and how we use it.


Ms Doherty spoke about text being fast, flexible, controllable, portable, and searchable. Text is truly an amazing innovation of mankind. Without it, communication would be immeasurably more difficult. I communicate to others mostly through text, and my future career will depend on it and my ability to manipulate it.


The Sun was offered as a prime example of text used effectively. The Sun's articles are delivered in a concise method, with the whole article often summarised succinctly in the first sentence which is often less than twenty words.


While text is often thought of as sentences and paragraphs, text can also be meaningful in other ways. As singular words, text can become metadata and tags, which are increasingly important in a world where most of our text is on the internet. Metadata and tags help us search through text to find precisely what we're after, so we can maximize the meaningful consumption of text, rather than general consumption in the hope that we may stumble across something we're interested in.


Key words used during a search for text are essential for including in the texts we write. This way people will be able to easily find and consume the text we create.


Less related to the lecture topic, Ms Doherty also mentioned ways that you can increase the significance of your text on the internet through search engine optimisation. Having a significant and relevant URL for your text instead of gibberish is important, as this will make it more visible in search engines. Also, if important websites link to your own, your ranking will increase on some search engines, making your web pages easier to find.


An interesting point that was covered in the lecture was methods to communicate news in methods other than text. An example shown was a 'news game' called Cutthroat Capitalism, which told the story of East African pirates and their methods of capturing significant ships to raise funds and continue the cycle. It was very simple, and was almost comical, but when you remembered that the options in the game are based on real examples, it kind of stressed the danger of those kind of situations. I thought it was an effective way to illustrate that story, and is definitely a useful tool in adding depth to an article.