The research from this ongoing nationally funded study explores multiliteracies and multimodality in secondary schools adult education settings including a museum, dance studio, French language learning centre. There are 30 participants to date the study. Using constructivist grounded theory methodology, draws upon data face-to-face interviews, observations, document analysis, original film foo...

Despite early and ongoing calls for a systematic engagement with history, social semiotics has largely emphasized research on the synchronic rather than diachronic dimensions of meaning-making. And while ‘instability’ semiotic practices (see Kress’s Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, 2010) importance change Van Leeuwen’s Introducing Semiotics, 2005) have be...

If you go into a bookshop and ask them where to find a book on semiotics you are likely to meet with a blank look. Even worse, you might be asked to define what semiotics is which would be a bit tricky if you were looking for a beginner’s guide. It’s worse still if you do know a bit about semiotics, because it can be hard to offer a simple definition which is of much use in the bookshop. If you...

We argue, reason, cajole, and persuade — we deploy rhetoric — because we are social animals endowed with a symbolic mode of thought and communication who seek to shape our social environment, to compete, and to cooperate. As rhetoricians, philosophers, and semiologists have regularly noticed, some patterns of argumentation and cajolery are more successful than others. These patterns of usage — ...

Based on formal-theoretical principles about the sign processes involved, we have built synthetic experiments to investigate the emergence of communication based on symbols and indexes in a distributed system of sign users, following theoretical constraints from C.S.Peirce theory of signs, following a Synthetic Semiotics approach. In this paper, we summarize these computational experiments and ...

The hybrid aspect of cultures has been on the agenda of cultural and social studies as well as the arts for several years. From the perspective of the semiotician, cultures will necessarily be in continuous contact with a minimum of neighbours in order to enhance cultural semiosis, i.e., to make innovation and change possible. Otherwise, isolation would be in effect and limit a culture to its o...

Evaluating cross-platform systems is challenging due to the different constraints and capabilities of each platform. In this paper we extend the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM), a Semiotic Engineering evaluation method, to evaluate cross-platform systems. We introduce the term cross-communicability to denote the quality of the meta-communication of the system as whole, taking into account the ...