Acquisition of Advanced Literacy Conference
University of California, Davis
February 2000
Jay L. Lemke
City University of New York
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
This paper describes preliminary work on the analysis of NASA websites. The main focus is on the multimedia literacy demands of the sites and individual pages, illuminated by a comparison between two sites, one for the educated public and one for professional scientists, each presenting essentially the same kind of information (color map visualizations of satellite data on earth surface conditions). The preliminary sections develop the framework of multimedia semiotic analysis, relate it to literacy studies in science education, and frame the web analysis in relation to earlier work on scientific print publications.
Technical Note: If using a slow internet connection, disable images and use the embedded links to NASA pages. Or be patient; image files are 70-100kB jpeg screen captures.
The Multimedia Literacy Demands of Scientific Education
Multimedia Genres of Scientific Print Publications
Scientific Literacies and New Multimedia Genres