Introduction to Part I: Encoding and Production Methodologies

Summary

My first mission as I evaluated Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street as a PeaceComm intervention was to understand the logic behind how it was designed. In order to assess whether what the Sesame Street audiences interpreted was indeed a direct (or even an indirect) result of the producers’ intentions, and so whether the intervention was effective precisely because of the producers’ efforts, I conducted an encoding study alongside my decoding study. This additional analysis outlines what features comprise the symbols the authors of these texts (in this case, the television producers and all those involved in the Sesame Street coproductions) attempted to include in the series, and what was rendered ultimately in the finished text. An encoding study aims to achieve this inasmuch as a text state can ever be assumed to be stable, given that audiences, or readers, do not necessarily read the text as planned.