Lisa Gjedde

In the Beginning Was the Experience

Danish University of Education, Emdrupvej 101, DK-2400 Copenhagen, lg@dpu.dk Communication Studies, Roskilde University, DK-4000 Roskilde, bruno@ruc.dk The tradition of media reception studies is primarily based on qualitative methods in which the informants are interviewed about their experiences and interpretations of the media or program investigated (Schrøder 2001). Their words are seen as the track to the conscious and unconscious experience from viewing, seeing or reading a media product in a naturalistic setting open for subjective interpretations. The tradition of experimental media reception studies, are in contrast often using quantitative methods. The materials that are tested are often consisting of different versions of the same message or format and the findings are often contrasted to those of a control group. The experimental media receptions studies are relatively few and in the following we will give an overview and seek to characterise the differences through carefully selected prototypes. These differences we see as based primarily on epistemological interests. In this article we are looking at the two traditions and how they may merge, in an experimental reception study with is focused on the informants experiences, and which involve the action of selecting and judging as a process that constitute the experience at a pre-verbal level. In the beginning was – not the word – but the experience. Our aim here is to establish and discuss the concept of experience as the foundation for the experimental reception study. What Is Experimental Reception Studies

Narrative, Genre and Context in Popular Science

Popular Science as a genre scaffolds a set of expectations and hypothesis the audience holds, one of them being that what they read about deals with fact not fiction. The readers are able to explicate some of this knowledge as stories about what their expectations are and according to cognitive psychologist Roger Schank such knowledge is stored and also serve as indices to stories. So genre and story are two concepts that interrelate closely, when it comes to exploring how genre functions on a cognitive level and looking at its qualities within a framework of cognitive theories and models that deals with schemas, scripts and stories. (Schank 1990; Huckin 1995) ”Genres are intellectual scaffolds on which community-based knowledge is constructed” (Huckin 1995) Berkensdotter & Huckin use this definition of genre in disciplinary communications where they are dealing with genre from a socio-cognitive perspective. It points to the cognitive importance and impact of genre. Seeing stories as fundamental to scaffolding knowledge (Schank 1990), one might raise the question if this cognitive concept of genre implies genre as comprising some of the stories within which other stories are imbedded? How does it relate to qualities like comprehension, relevance and credibility, and how are the narrative responses, that serve to generate meaning, to the different genres? What are the cognitive implications of the genre that is inscribed through textual elements? What are the readers criteria for how they perceive the credibility of the articles? How can it be related to the readers situated cognition, to their background and gender, to their personal contexts and how can it be seen reflecting in their retellings? This present article undertakes to look at a few of these issues in particular those dealing with gender and the readers comprehension of the gist of articles in relation to level of narrative, and how relevance and credibility is perceived and constructed.