The cultural theorist Stuart Hall was one of the main proponents of reception theory, first developed in his 1973 essay 'Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse'.
His approach, called the encoding/decoding model of communication, is a form of textual analysis that focuses on the scope of "negotiation" and "opposition" by the audience.
Umberto Eco coined the term aberrant decoding to describe the case when the reader's interpretation differs from what the artist intended.
The theory recognizes that there is no single reading of a landscape that fulfills its entire potential, and that it is important to examine the motives of visitors and the factors influencing their visits (whether they read guidebooks about the place before visiting, or had strong feelings about the place or the designer, for instance).
In the context of the Bible, reception history comprises the manifold interpretations of the biblical text from the time that it was written until now.
Reception history does not restrict interpretations by medium either; it includes the use of art, music, poetry, and liturgy.
Gadamer saw the contextualized interpretation of scripture and the empirical knowledge about its development are best understood to be in a dialogical relationship with one another.
[6] Because of the various sources, traditions, and editions of the earliest biblical texts it is difficult to know what was considered original and was interpreted.