Semiotic Choices Research Articles

Selling Health and Fitness to Sporty Sisters: A Critical Feminist Multi-Modal Discourse Analysis of the Lorna Jane Retail Website

In this paper, I conduct a feminist multimodal critical discourse analysis (FMCDA) of the Lorna Jane (LJ) retail website (www.lornajane.com.au), an Australian fitness fashion company, to examine the discursive strategies used by the company to authorize a particular notion of “active living” for women. Specifically, I shall examine how the semiotic choices on the LJ website signify key discourses and themes related to health and fitness and how they are used to place the responsibility for fitness and health onto individual women. In particular, I focus on the discourses inscribed through the technologies, styles, fabrics, colors, cuts, and sizing of LJ clothing items. I am also interested in the underlying choices, assumptions, and biases of these constructions and the power relationships underpinning them. I conclude that “empowerment” for women on the LJ website is imagined in a limited, individualistic way.

A Funnier "Monk": A Multimodal Approach to Transnational TV Series Adaptations

In their book Reading Television (1978: 64-5), John Fiske and John Hartley define television as a medium that provides the members of a particular community with a “confirming, reinforcing version of themselves.” Although the introduction of the unfamiliar and innovative via televisual productions is a business imperative as well as a cultural necessity today, television continues to function as a mirror of its receiving society, and provide its viewers with culturally appropriate content through its various semiotic modes of communication situated within the visual, verbal, and sound tracks. Televisual productions, in this sense, can be viewed as one of the most salient multimodal texts through which our everyday politics are continuously materialized, fictionalized, and rendered into an entertaining popular language that shapes our everyday perceptions and expectations. Transnational format adaptations, in particular, stand out as ample content-rich texts in which the processes of localization and appropriation, realized through individual semiotic choices made by producers, manifest themselves. It is the goal of this paper to trace back such semiotic choices made during the re-production phase of transnational format adaptations, and reveal sociocultural and political interventions in meaning making at the time, through a multimodal analysis of an American comedy crime series, Monk , and its Turkish adaptation, Galip Dervis .

Online leadership discourse in higher education: A digital multimodal discourse perspective

As leadership discourses in higher education are increasingly being mediated online, texts previously reserved for staff are now being made available in the public domain. As such, these texts become accessible for study, critique and evaluation. Additionally, discourses previously confined to the written domain are now increasingly multimodal. Thus, an approach is required that is capable of relating detailed, complex multimodal discourse analyses to broader sociocultural perspectives to account for the complex meaning-making practices that operate in online leadership discourses. For this purpose, a digital multimodal discourse approach is proposed and illustrated via a small-scale case study of the online leadership discourse of an Australian university. The analysis of two short video texts demonstrates how a digital multimodal discourse perspective facilitates the identification of key multimodal systems used for meaning-making in online communication, how meaning arises through combinations of semiotic choices (not individual choices), and how the results of multimodal discourse analysis using digital technology can reveal larger sociocultural patterns – in this case, divergent leadership styles and approaches as reflected in online discourse, at a time of immense change within the higher education sector.

Introduction: Communicating time and place on digital media—Multi-layered temporalities & (Re)localizations

The Introduction to this Special Issue identifies a gap of empirical insights into how the digital media-enabled drastic redefinitions of time and space/place experience impact on communication choices. This is despite extensive theorizing of time and space/place in media & cultural studies on the one hand and, on the other hand, despite a thriving line of (socio)linguistic inquiry into how physical time and space/place are made socio-culturally meaningful in specific communication acts. In the light of this, I outline the main aims and motivations for bringing together emerging discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives on communicating time and space/place in digital media, with this collection of papers. In discussing the seven contributions and their methodological and analytical commonalities but also diversity, I show how they attend to the linguistic and multi-modal choices with which digital media users and producers orient to, negotiate, foreground or challenge aspects of the here & now as well as of any other places and times invoked in their communication. In addition to this, all contributions interrogate the ways in which semiotic choices related to time and place shape and are informed by individuals’ identities, audience assumptions & the (re)formation of online communities. The main themes in this respect include:–Communicating time and place of private experiences in (semi)-public forums with a potential for unknown and multiple audiences to tune in and become part of the communication;–Creating co-presence and reaffirming relationships and communities through discourse activities of marking or evoking time and place;–The often competing inter-relations between online and offline time and place;–The interdependence between the spatial architecture of digital media environments and any communication acts in them, which often involves a process of turning online spaces into inhabited places.I claim that all contributions demonstrate the need for conceptual and analytical tools and methods that are well-suited to capturing multi-layered arrangements of communicating time and place in digital environments.

Signs in cities: the discursive production and commodification of urban spaces

The analysis of signs in cities is known as research into ‘linguistic landscapes’. Following Jaworski and Thurlow (2010), this paper focuses on ‘semiotic’ not linguistic landscapes. I argue that visual images and visual aspects of writing such as font or colour are essential for the meanings conveyed on signs. As an example, I examine the semiotic landscape of parts of Prenzlauer Berg, a neighbourhood of the former East Berlin. Neglected in the 1980s, after reunification, this originally working class area became middle class and trendy, popular for its shops, cafes and arts culture. Using multimodal and ethnographic methods, my paper reveals the important role commercial signs and street art play in the discursive re-construction of this gentrified neighbourhood. Both contribute to the area’s commercialization and aestheticization. My paper also illustrates how semiotic landscapes contribute to placemaking and the commodification of urban spaces. The combination of multimodal analysis with interviews with sign authors allowed for insights into the reasons specific semiotic choices were made, adding to our understanding of discourse production by revealing intended meanings which were not identifiable based on text analysis alone.

The multimodal representation of emotion in film: Integrating cognitive and semiotic approaches

This study provides a semiotic theorization of how emotion is represented in film to complement the cognitive approach, which focuses on how film elicits emotion from viewers. Drawing upon social semiotic theories and cognitive theories of emotion, we develop a multimodal framework in which filmic representation of emotion is seen as combinations of semiotic choices derived from cognitive components of emotion. The semiotic model is employed to investigate how emotive meaning is realized through verbal and nonverbal resources. At the discursive level of film, the choices available in the shot organization of eliciting condition and expression are examined. The paper demonstrates how the social semiotic approach, combined with cognitive theory of emotion structure, is able to provide a comprehensive theoretical account of how various film techniques represent emotion. It is also significant for the study of viewer emotion, which to a large degree stems from character emotion.

Multimodal digital semiotics: the interaction of language with other resources

AbstractA “multimodal digital semiotics” approach, involving the development and use of interactive digital media technology, mathematical techniques of analysis and scientific visualization for modeling and analyzing multimodal phenomena, is demonstrated through the analysis of an interview between a climate scientist and a climate denialist on Fox News. Prototype software for multimodal analysis and network visualizations are used in combination with Allen's interval algebra to model multimodal semantic data and identify significant patterns based on temporal relationships between different semiotic choices. The resulting semantic patterns reveal combinations of semiotic choices that were drawn upon by the different speakers during the interview, accounting for how the climate denialist emerges as the dominant and convincing interviewee. Such an approach combines the objectivity of mathematical modeling and scientific visualization with the interpretive power of Halliday's systemic theory.

Individuality or conformity? Identity in personal and university academic homepages

► University homepages position academics as employees, appropriating their expertise for institutional ends. ► An analysis of the university managed and personally managed homepages of 50 academics indicates how identity is discursively constructed using a range of semiotic resources. ► Findings show that while design features differ, personal pages reveal little individuality and present a purely academic identity. ► Failure to make fuller use of this medium of disclosure to offer a more multi-dimensional identity suggests to viewers that the bland academic presented is all there is. The connection between writing and identity has been a subject of academic interest for some time and there is now broad agreement that identity is created from the texts we engage in and the semiotic choices we make. In this view, the process of constructing an identity most clearly involves selecting materials to present to others, a process which is seen most directly in personal homepages. It has become almost obligatory for academics to maintain some kind of online presence, although these homepages can also serve the university in several ways and therefore suppresses more personal facets of identity and act to position the author as an employee. As a result, many academics seek to escape the bland uniformity of the university personal page to present a more multi-faceted identity in a self-managed homepage. This paper explores the this relatively neglected area of composition to show how identity is discursively constructed in a corpus of 100 homepages of 50 academics, one university-managed and the other personally created. Focusing on textual content, design, links and photographs, I contrast some of the ways that academics elect to represent themselves as academics in these two environments.

Discourses of unity and purpose in the sounds of fascist music: a multimodal approach

This article, taking a social semiotic approach, analyses two pieces of music written, shared and exalted by two pre-1945 European fascist movements – the German NSDAP and the British Union of Fascists. These movements, both political and cultural, employed mythologies of unity, common identity and purpose in order to elide the realities of social distinction and political–economic inequalities between bourgeois and proletarian groups in capitalist societies. Visually (through art, sculpture, architecture, the aesthetics of dress, uniform and gesture) and inter-personally (through political marches, parades and rallies), the fascist cultural project communicated a machine-like certainty about a vision for a new society based on discipline, conformity and the might of the nation. In this article, we are interested in the ways that these very same discourses are also communicated through sound and music in two songs: The Horst Wessel Lied and the BUF marching song, two songs that used the same melody. We analyse the discourses communicated by the semiotic choices made in melody, arrangements, sound qualities, rhythms as well as in lyrics. The article first identifies some of the underlying semiotic resources for meaning making in sound and then shows how these are used in order to communicate specific ideas, values and attitudes.

Relationship between a Visual Art and Its Cultural Background

This paper attempts to explore the relationship between a particular culture and its visual art by comparing two landscape paintings with distinctive cultural backgrounds. The Chinese landscape painting Early Spring (1072) and the Western landscape painting The Hay Wain (1821) respectively created by Guo Xi and John Constable are chosen for the purpose. The two paintings are compared by adopting Michael O’Toole’s (1994) systemic-functional model for the analysis of visual images in terms of Modal, Compositional and Representational functions. The comparison shows that the semiotic choices are different across the three functions. This paper then explains the semiotic differences between the two paintings by examining the distinctions between Chinese and English cultures. The findings in the research suggest that the semiotic distinctions in visual arts arise from different understandings of some fundamental values and principles in different cultures.

The gate of the gateway: A hypermodal approach to university homepages

This paper adopts a social semiotic perspective to investigate how hypermodal resources (e.g., text, image, hyperlinks) integrate on two university homepages to simultaneously create an official gateway and an institutional identity. In the first case, the homepage of National University of Singapore foregrounds and promotes its identity as a vibrant community that is global and welcoming by appealing images, interpersonally-orientated linguistic choices, rich navigation content, and various navigation styles. Tsinghua University in China, on the other hand, adopts a university-centric position in its homepage design by presenting its identity as a traditional and authoritative institution that keeps its distance from society at large through the impersonal nature of the images and linguistic texts, and the repetitive hierarchical navigation styles. These semiotic choices are interpreted from a socio-cultural perspective and the universities' involvement in marketization. The present study builds upon and extends multimodal approaches to hypermedia by considering the relations between hypermodal analytics and higher-level cultural and ideological meanings.

Children's writing goes 3D: a case study of one primary school's journey into multimodal authoring

This paper draws from research conducted as part of an Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project ‘Teaching effective 3D authoring in the middle years: multimedia grammatical design and multimedia authoring pedagogy’, which is a collaboration between the University of New England, the University of Tasmania and the Australian Children's Television Foundation. This project is being conducted in over 20 schools around Australia. The data presented in this paper focuses on one such school, located in Tasmania. It explores one school's endeavour in the teaching and learning of multimodal narrative. Data includes interviews from students and multimodal analysis of student narratives. The paper showcases the kinds of semiotic choices the children are making for their stories, and includes excerpts from the interviews to illustrate how they are able to articulate justifications for their choices. In particular, it focuses on how children are establishing literary concepts such as genre, characterisation and point of view using all semiotic resources. In doing so, it considers the pedagogy behind the creations to explore how effectively it works as children create new kinds of texts which are innovative, critical, creative and ‘of quality’.

Mathematical Marriages

This paper examines the interaction between Semiotic choices and the presentation and solution of a family of contemporary mathematical problems centred around the so-called 'stable marriage problem'. I investigate how a socially restrictive choice of signs impacts mathematical production both in terms of problem formation and of solutions. I further note how the choice of gendered language ends up constructing a reality, which duplicates the very structural framework that it imported into mathematical analysis in the first place. I go on to point out some semiotic lines of flight from this interlocking grip of mathematics and gendered language.

Aesthetics Making Meaning

Aesthetics matter because through aesthetic practices people make individual and collective meaning. Consider two different senses in which making meaning can be understood as central curricular goals of art education-one, is to engage and understand through active interpretation;1 a second is to act as an artist-creating works from which the artist and others draw meaning, pleasure, and purpose. Knowledge from the discipline of supports both the interpreter and the maker in making nuanced observations of form, imagery, metaphors, antecedent practices, related concepts, and social and political implications as well as in utilizing various strategies to construct and develop artworks.Making MeaningIn From Work to Text, Roland Barthes (1971/1984) proposed that meaning is not made by an artist/author depositing meaning into a work through a series of signifiers that then produce a fixed meaning or true significance that must be extracted or uncovered by the reader/viewer. Instead, Barthes suggested the possibility of a hedonistic aesthetics in which signifiers are put into play by the artist/author (p. 174). The viewer/ reader/interpreter then plays with the weave of signifiers, making and re-making the meaning of the artwork through active engagement (p. 171). An artwork seen in this way is rich in meaning, but the meaning is open and decentered.Terry Eagleton's (1990) influential book, The Ideohgy of the Aesthetic, continued the challenge to ahistorical, apolitical concepts of aesthetic valuing through a careful articulation of the relationship between artistic sensibilities and other cultural values, thereby broadening the subject of to include its own uses and history. The modernist hermetic aesthetic experience is now rarely evoked by knowledgeable professionals because understanding contemporary art and theories of representation point to more complex mechanisms by which meaning is created (Hall, 1997; Harrison & Wood, 1993; Jameson, 1991; Mitchell, 2005). Today's fields of visual studies or visual culture can be seen as manifestations of within this expanded field of signifying practices - investigating semiotic choices about how still and moving images are structured (what has traditionally been called aesthetic choices) as key generators of cultural meaning (Dikovitskaya, 2005; Elkins, 2003; Freedman, 2003; Smith-Shank, 2004).Good contemporary art education can reflect the best practices of contemporary aesthetics. Ideas such as Barthes' ludic process of meaning making or visual culture investigations that consider how subject positions are created through how persons are hailed by cultural communications are suggested by principles of interpretation developed by art educator Terry Barrett (2003, 2007). Such principles as artworks attract multiple and it is not the goal of interpretation to arrive at single, grand, unified, composite interpretations, or interpretations imply a worldview, and of are not limited to what their artists intended them to mean provide plain language guides to effective, sophisticated aesthetic analysis of the meanings generated by (Barrett, 2003, p. 198). Such a contemporary approach to aesthetic investigation can encourage students to understand that just as meaning within and other cultural productions is socially generated, their own subjective experiences - responses to and reading of cultural artifacts - are not a natural given, but rather are generated within personal and societal experiences (Keifer-Boyd & Maitland-Gholson, 2007).Meaningful MakingArt (and the aesthetic practices that make art possible) can make life meaningful. Through artworks, personal and community experience is represented, re-presented, re-shaped, and re-formed. Alice Walker, talking about the importance of art in her life, wrote, It is, in the end the saving of lives that we writers are about . …

Spectacular ethics

This article argues that the BBC World footage of the bombardment of Baghdad, March–April 2003, manages to take sides in the controversy over the Iraq war, without violating the principle of objectivity — a principle necessary for the credibility of public service broadcasting. Making use of the ‘analytics of mediation’, I show that the semiotic choices of this footage construe the bombardment of Baghdad in a regime of pity, whereby the aesthetic quality of the spectacle effaces the presence of Iraqi people as human beings and sidelines the question of the coalition troops identity either as benefactors or bombers. This combination is instrumental in aestheticising the horror of war at the expense of raising issues around the legitimacy and effects of the war. The taking of sides in the BBC ‘update’ occurs precisely through this aestheticised representation of warfare that denies the sufferer her humanity and relieves the bomber of his responsibility in inflicting the suffering. By rendering these identities irrelevant to the spectacle of the suffering, the footage ultimately suppresses the emotional, ethical and political issues that lie behind the bombardment of Baghdad.

The Techno-Literacy Practices of Young Children

In many analyses of children’s ‘emergent literacy’ (Clay, 1966) practices, there is little acknowledgement of children’s engagement in techno-literacy practices. This article discusses findings from a survey undertaken in a working-class community in the north of England which aimed to identify the ‘emergent techno-literacy’ practices of a group of 44 children aged between two and a half and four years of age. It is argued that the multimodal textual competencies and semiotic choices of these ‘toddler netizens’ (Luke, 1999) should be more widely acknowledged within current curriculum frameworks for the early years.

Firing Practice: Drawing as Empowerment

The domain of drawing is mapped as a matrix integrating the social functions of drawing with the systems of semiotic choices and levels of perception. Such a matrix facilitates students to realize meaning in drawings and facilitates viewers to negotiate meanings from drawings. It is proposed that understanding the domain of drawing empowers students' practice.