| In 1948, Claude Shannon published an article entitled, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in The Bell System Technical Journal. Shannon's twenty-three theorems proved to be a watershed in the field of electrical engineering. Equally intriguing is the fact that mathematical communication theory has been adopted and modified to suit the research interests of a wide range of disciplines spanning the arts, the pure and applied sciences, and the social sciences. Yet, attempts to apply Shannon's work within the field of Communication Studies have not provided many notable insights regarding the nature and process of human communication: Shannon's theorems have been perceived as possessing only limited utility by many scholars in the discipline. This thesis examines whether or not structural modeling techniques which employ measures of information (as developed by Klaus Krippendorff) constitute a valid application of Shannon's theorems to the study of human communication. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
