Issues

Featured

Beware Signifiers: Progression of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish Signage Board

This began as an exploration of messages in our society. How do we develop these messages? Produce and distribute these messages? What are the aesthetic principles to these messages? I’m searching for a bloodline that rings throughout the entire platform of communication tactics, hoping that the sum is directly reflective when analyzing its parts. I started out thinking about these messages objectively but was quick to realize that when dealing with messages, you’re not just looking at how a sign looks and where it’s placed; you’re dealing with its words and indefinitely words aren’t without their healthy dose of subtext. This isn’t simply an exploration into messages; this is a scope into communication, leading to ideals, leading to communities, leading to humanity. Messages are representative of us, a modern trail of breadcrumbs, leading us to what we hope will manifest itself into validity or some sort of raw truth. […]

Issues

World Report: The Peirce Edition Project

  Foreword: Visiting the Peirce Edition Project Looking backward, any scholar can probably identify the precise moment in which her researches took a sudden and decisive turn, thus shaping the rest of her academic life. […]

Issues

Semiotics in Poland

In 2008 Polskie Towarzystwo Semiotyczne [Polish Semiotic Society  (PSS)]  begun its fifth decade of existence. Since the very beginning (1968), PSS has been acting  on many areas of theoretical and applied semiotics including linguistics, logic, […]

Issues

Semiotics at (Social) Work

The pressing challenges of cultural diversity offer fertile ground for applied research in semiotics and for exploration of its potential to bridge existing gaps between cultural theory and educational practice. For example, in its White […]

Issues

Reading, Writing, Reckoning: The Long View

There is an abundant literature, in philosophy and psychology, which addresses literacy and numeracy from the restricted point of view of alphabetic cultures. There are also comparative studies involving other advanced societies which do not […]

Editorial

Semiotox

Can signs be toxic? Can there be killer signs, either because of their inherent properties or because of their sheer number?   Notwithstanding the claims of the modern avatars of Doctor Angelicus and Doctor Pangloss, signs […]

Featured

Multimodal Digital Semiotics

One of the major challenges in the development of software for multimodal analysis is the variety of media types and data which such software must handle. Software development, as with the human sciences, have tended towards compartmentalization during what Halliday referred to (1991: 39) as ‘the age of disciplines’, thus most relevant software applications tend to operate on specific types of data or provide specific tools for particular tasks. An intrinsic problem for multimodal digital software then is the computational integration of resources for the analysis of written text, image, sound, video, hypermedia and potentially any other media of communication (cf. Schmidt et. al. on software interoperability). […]

Guest column

The Future of Wikileaks

Wikileaks provides a familiar glimpse into the future of networked knowledge. It is an effect of the slow erosion of the distinction between classified and declassified information. This erosion is the consequence of the manner […]