Communication

Be Credible

This book teaches college-level journalism and strategic communication students to become information experts.

Licence: CC BY-NC

Business Communications

Students will learn how to analyze context and audience, determine purpose, message content, visual design and media in order to create written workplace messages that can be received, understood, used and retrieved with speed and accuracy.

Licence: CC BY

Business Communications 2

Communication in the Real World: An Introduction to Communication Studies

This book overviews the time-tested conceptual foundations of the field, while incorporating the latest research and cutting-edge applications of these basics. Each chapter will include timely, concrete, and real-life examples of communication concepts in action.

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA

Communication Theory

This Wikibook is an introduction to communication theory — the theory of how humans share, encode, and decode what they know, what they need, and what they expect from each other.

Licence: CC BY-SA

Digital Photography for Graphic Communications

The purpose of this book is to serve as a reference for a one-semester course in digital photography for graphic communications. Since digital cameras have mostly replaced colour scanners, graphic communicators need to capture images for use in magazines, catalogs, brochures, packages, signs, banners—all forms of printed materials—and also for eBooks, web sites, and apps. It is based on a 2009 print book by the authors that was called Digital Photography for Print and published by the Printing Industries of America (PIA) Press.

Licence: CC BY

A Guide to Technical Communications: Strategies & Applications

This open textbook was designed for Engineering Technical Communications courses at The Ohio State University.

Licence: CC BY-NC

Information Strategies for Communicators

The definitive text for the information search and evaluation process as practiced by news and strategic communication message producers.

Licence: CC BY

Interpersonal Communication: A Mindful Approach to Relationships

This book helps readers examine their own one-on-one communicative interactions using a mindfulness lens and incorporating the latest communication theory and research to help students navigate everyday interpersonal interactions. The book cover topics typically taught in an undergraduate interpersonal communication course: family interactions, interpersonal dynamics, language, listening, nonverbal communication, and romantic relationships, as well as exploring emerging areas such as self-compassion, body positivity, friendships, and “the dark side”.

Licence: CC BY-BC-SA

Key Concepts in Surveillance Studies

A student-authored glossary highlighting twenty-six key concepts in Surveillance Studies. For each concept, the student provided a concise definition of the concept that makes its connection to surveillance studies clear and provided an example.

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA

Management Communication

From the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University, this open textbook addresses business communication which is concise, direct, clear, and compelling.Communication is the heart of business. Short emails, complex reports, private chats, impassioned pitches, formal presentations, and team meetings move information and ideas around an organization, define strategy, and drive decisions.

Licence: CC BY-SA

Organizational Communication

This textbooks helps students demonstrate an understanding of key topics and concepts, including communication networks, media management, organizational culture and climate, intercultural communication, meetings management, ethical communication, assessing communication quality, and crisis communication – and the impact of social technologies.

Licence: CC BY-SA

STEM Foundations

This course offers practice using workplace communication, with activities designed to strengthen skills in preparation for entering a college program in a STEM career.

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA

WISC-Online Communication Learning Objects

A collection of learning objects on various communication topics.

Licence: CC BY-NC

Write Like a PR Pro

Write Like a PR Pro covers how to write and develop messages in different formats from professionals with expertise in different areas of communication. It was written by an instructor who teaches at The Ohio State University.

Licence: CC BY-NC

Film Studies

The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema

The Altering Eye covers a “golden age” of international cinema from the end of WWII through to the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Combining historical, political, and textual analysis, Kolker develops a pattern of cinematic invention and experimentation from neorealism through the modernist interventions of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, focusing along the way on such major figures as Luis Buñuel, Joseph Losey, the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, and the work of major Cuban filmmakers.

Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Note: This is an open access text which restricts remixing and adapting).

Exploring Movie Construction and Production: What’s so Exciting about Movies?

This open textbook contains eight chapters of the major areas of film construction and production, including: theme; genre; narrative structure’ character portrayal; story; plot; directing style; cinematography; and editing.

Includes: Assignments, vocabulary

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Film and the City: The Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinema

Examining fourteen Canadian films produced from 1989 to 2007, including Denys Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989), Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (1992), Mina Shum’s Double Happiness (1994), Clément Virgo’s Rude (1995), and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007), Film and the City is the first comprehensive study of Canadian film and “urbanity”—the totality of urban culture and life. Please note that while available for free download, this book is not licensed for edits.

Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CA

Film Appreciation

This open textbook covers narration, film history, mise-on-scène, cinematography, editing, sound, genre, writing film analysis.

Includes: Embedded video, glossary

Licence: CC BY 4.0

Moving Pictures: An Introduction to Cinema

A free and open-source introduction to the art and science of moving pictures, offering in-depth exploration of how cinema communicates, and what, exactly, it is trying to say.

Includes: Embedded film clips as examples

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Reviews: Available through the Open Textbook Library

Media Studies

Foundations in Visual Media Production

This textbook is designed as an introduction to the process of producing visual media.

Licence: CC BY-SA

Humans R Social Media

Social media and humans exist in a world of mutual influence, and humans play central roles in how this influence is mediated and transferred. Originally created by University of Arizona Information scholar Diana Daly, this Third Edition of the book Humans R Social Media uses plain language and features contributions by students to help readers understand how we as humans shape social media, and how social media shapes our world in turn.

Licence: CC BY

Media Programming

The Media Programming course contextualizes the task of programming by focusing on media, such as images, audio, and interactive systems. By doing so, we hope to put programming in a relevant context. For example, iteration is a programming concept that is essential to creating negative and grayscale images. You will learn algorithms for blending two images together and how hierarchical relationships are used to organize elements of a user interface.

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA

Social Media & the Self

Social Media & the Self is intended to serve students enrolled in media and communication courses…It’s an open reader: a collection of works available on the open web, selected and ordered with university courses in mind. Each of its component works already carries an open access license, or—in the case of copyrighted items—links to a web version (description from resource).

Licence: CC BY-NC

The Social Media Reader

This book covers a wide-ranging topical terrain, much like the internet itself, with particular emphasis on collaboration and sharing, the politics of social media and social networking, Free Culture and copyright politics, and labour and ownership. Theorizing new models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and labor, these essays outline possibilities for cultural democracy that arise when the formerly passive audience becomes active cultural creators, while warning of the dystopian potential of new forms of surveillance and control.

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA

Trends in Digital and Social Media

Social media and other digital devices have entered our collective bloodstream. This e-book touches upon the human experience of contemporary trends that affect how we perceive ourselves, others, and society.

Licence: CC BY-SA

Visual Communication

A general education textbook for the study of visual rhetoric and the use of visual media as a means for conveying information to an audience. In particular, we will limit our attention to the use of still imagery because of the vast, openly available repositories of visual media and the simplicity of manipulating them.

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA

Your Subject Librarian in the Department of Communication, Media and Film is Merran Carr-Wiggin.