Semiotic Domain Research Articles

Investigating the relationships between informal learning and player involvement in digital games

In the last few years, digital games have become increasingly popular with both ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ audiences. At the same time, it has been argued that games can be powerful learning environments, since they are seen to encourage active and critical learning through participation in affinity groups and semiotic domains but there is a need for further empirical evidence to explore how this participation occurs and how prevalent it actually is. In addition the effectiveness of games within education indicates mixed results, though it has been suggested that this may indicate that learning through immersive worlds involves a more complex understanding of learning, one that is not so easy to tie to specified learning outcomes. It would seem the area would benefit from research that seeks to develop our understanding of how player involvement and learning come together in this context. This paper presents the preliminary results of a survey carried out in order to explore these issues. The initial findings suggest that how a player identifies as a gamer relates to what they think they gain from their gaming experiences with respect to learning.

Reassessing the Foundations of Semiotics

What justifies a discipline is its grounding in practical activities. Documentary evidence is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for viability. This applies to semiotics as it applies to mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science, and all other forms of questioning the world. While all forms of knowledge testify to the circularity of the epistemological effort, semiotics knowledge is doubly cursed. There is no knowledge that can be expressed otherwise than in semiotic form; knowledge of semiotics is itself expressed semiotically. Semiotics defined around the notion of the sign bears the burden of unsettled questions prompted by the never-ending attempt to define signs. This indeterminate condition is characteristic of all epistemological constructs, whether in reference to specific knowledge domains or semiotics. The alternative is to associate the knowledge domain of semiotics with the meta-level, i.e., inquiry of what makes semiotics necessary. In a world of action-reaction, corresponding to a rather poor form of causality, semiotics is not necessary. Only in acknowledging the anticipatory condition of the living can grounding for semiotics be found. This perspective becomes critical in the context of a semiotized civilization in which the object level of human effort is progressively replaced by representations (and their associated interpretations).

Work in Progress: Digital games: Exploring the relationship between motivation, engagement and informal learning

It has been suggested that digital games can be powerful learning environments that encourage active and critical learning, including participation within ‘affinity groups’ and ‘semiotic domains’ (Gee, 2004). However, there is a need to provide further empirical evidence to substantiate these claims, while there is little research that attempts to explore the links between motivation, engagement and informal learning. This paper reports on work in progress which aims to explore theses links through three different studies of adult games players. The first study examines a series of email interviews to find out more about people’s game-playing experiences; the second consists of a set of eight case studies examining how involvement and learning come together in and around instances of game-play; and the third includes a survey, to find out how prevalent certain game-playing activities are amongst different kinds of players. Furthering our understanding of how motivation, engagement and learning relate to each other within commercially available digital games will have important implications for the design of more formal educational environments.

Artful Practices: Identities at Work in Play

This article considers the connectivity between arts-based pedagogies, multimodality, popular culture, learning and identity work within the semiotic domains of communities of play. Drawing on the artful practices of two Year 5 boys of Vietnamese and Sudanese cultural heritage, it reflects on how cultural artefacts were put to work in identity play during a seven-week drawing class in an urban Australian primary classroom. The article proposes how the technology of play in childhood is increasingly situated and connected to artefacts of identity. The troublesome presence of play challenges the axiomatic, regulatory norms of pedagogical practices in educational domains, and by drawing on the production of multimodal texts as a narrativizing practice the author endeavours to understand how arts-based pedagogies that utilize young people's cultural capital can create teachable moments and have a positive effect on engagement, participation and achievement in learning.

Do you understand what you are reading?

This article discusses the concepts of literacy, theological literacy and literacy practices as a resource for understanding how tradition and faith/belief are intertwined. Against the background of recent elaborations of literacy within the field of literature and educational studies, the suggestion is made that “tradition” can be understood as a semiotic domain, i.e. a set of practices that recruits one or more modalities to communicate distinctive types of meanings. Theological literacy is accordingly defined as the ability to interpret, develop and communicate a theological semiotic domain. Literacy helps us to see that Christian faith/belief cannot be taught and acquired once and for all by learning a doctrinal content and a specific religious practice. At the same time, however, literacy nevertheless stresses the importance of knowing doctrinal content and religious practise, seeing that literacy is part of the process of shaping and construing faith and tradition.

Switchings under uncertainty: The coming and becoming of meanings

While structure and culture often are proclaimed dual and yet autonomous, this paper spells out a processual approach in which structure and culture are seen as intertwined and interdependent formations. To that end, we aim at understanding how meanings come to be, then build into process, and become integrated in a set of constructs of differing scopes, scales, and levels collectively known as “culture.” Meanings are “sparks” generated by irregular switchings across socio-cultural compounds called “netdoms,” mixtures of social networks and semiotic domains. Switchings originate from identities mitigating uncertainty from biophysical sources and from attempts at control by other identities. A “story” concatenates meanings in a relational structure within a horizon of possibilities. Netdoms constitute the fabric of socio-cultural life, wherein domains—through stories—provide the interpretive texture, while networks—through relations—supply the social texture. Socio-cultural formations invoking more complex compounds of stories (story-lines and plots) thereby frame social time, enabling, through narratives, mobilization for social action. We further model a level of syncopated complexity, denoted “style,” which illuminates the puzzle of how culture and structure fit together. (Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Seminar Series in Social Network Analysis in Manchester, UK on January 15th, 2008, at the Harvard Business School on March 17, 2008, and at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco on August 8, 2009.)

Reflexivity and self-augmentation

In this article, sign and language systems are analyzed from the viewpoint of reflexivity - a system's ability to reinterpret its own output. Human and natural sign systems are reflexive, so this feature has not become an issue in the domain of semiotics. In contrast, not all computer language systems are reflexive, and analysis shows that there are degrees of reflexivity. The history of computer language systems can therefore be regarded as a journey to discover ways of exploiting the reflexivity inherent in each language system to make it more dynamic and self-augmenting. This article examines various computer language systems from the viewpoint of reflexivity and compares this feature with the same feature in human systems.

Anticipation and the artificial: aesthetics, ethics, and synthetic life

If complexity is a necessary but not sufficient premise for the existence and expression of the living, anticipation is the distinguishing characteristic of what is alive. Anticipation is at work even at levels of existence where we cannot refer to intelligence. The prospect of artificially generating aesthetic artifacts and ethical constructs of relevance to a world in which the natural and the artificial are coexistent cannot be subsumed as yet another product of scientific and technological advancement. Beyond the artificial, the synthetic conjures the understanding of aesthetics and ethics no longer from the perspective of the How? type of question, but rather the Why? Given the current infatuation with synthetic biology (i.e., making life from non-life), there is a practical consequence to such considerations. Synthetic life, as any other form of life, implies the possibility of evolution. Anticipation, which is the underlying factor of evolution, is thus expected. At the level of human existence, anticipation is expressed, for instance (but not exclusively), in aesthetic forms and ethical values. This translates, in turn, into an argument for the role aesthetics and ethics play in the process. Consequently, to qualify as life, the synthesis of the physical and the living will have to efficiently handle ambiguity. Current computational facilities, regardless of their nature or performance, operate exclusively in the semiotic domain of the well defined non-ambiguous.

The Meaning of Race and Violence in Grand Theft Auto

This research study investigates how youths actually play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and what meanings they make from it. This study finds that players use their own experiences and knowledge to interpret the game—they do not passively receive the games' images and content. The meanings they produce about controversial subjects are situated in players' local practices, identities, and discourse models as they interact with the game's semiotic domain. The results suggest that scholars need to study players in naturalistic settings if they want to see what “effects” games are having on players.

Semiotic Machine

A semiotic machine, no matter how it is embodied or expressed, has to reflect the various understandings of what the knowledge domain of semiotics is. It also has to reflect what methods and means support further acquiring knowledge of semiotics. Moreover, it has to express ways in which knowledge of semiotics is tested, improved, and evaluated. Given the scope of the endeavor of defining the semiotic machine, the methodological approach must be anchored in the living experience of semiotics. Accordingly, the cultural-historic perspective, which is the backbone of any encyclopedic endeavor, is very much like a geological survey for a foundation conceived from a dynamic perspective. The various layers could shed light on a simple aspect of the subject: At which moment in the evolution of semiotics does it make sense to make the association (in whatever form) to tools and to what would become the notion of a machine? Reciprocally, we would have to explain how the various understandings of the notions tool and machine are pertinent to whatever was the practice of semiotics at a certain juncture. Yet another reference cannot be ignored: The reductionist-deterministic view, celebrated in what is known as the Cartesian Revolution. Since that particular junction in our understanding of the world, the reduction of semiotic processes to machine descriptions is no longer a matter of associations (literal or figurative), but a normative dimension implicitly or explicitly expressed in semiotic theories. Given this very intricate relation, we will have to systematize the variety of angles from which various understandings of the compound expression semiotic machine can be defined.In our days, such understandings cover a multitude of aspects, ranging from the desire to build machines that can perform particular semiotic operations to a new understanding of the living, in view of our acquired knowledge of genetics, molecular biology, and information biology. That the computer—a particular form of machine—as an underlying element of a civilization defined primarily as one of information processing, could be and has been considered a semiotic machine deserves further consideration.

La destination communautaire de l'interprétation, leDe doctrina christianad'Augustin

ABSTRACTIn theDe doctrina christianaAugustine lays the foundations of a type of hermeneutics more community oriented than epistemological. Likewise, the rules he formulates have jurisdiction beyond the sole domain of semiotics; as I shall argue, they are applicable, in like (even congruent) manner, to the world of social relations. More fundamentally, these rules are intended to moderate an economy of desire, in which semiotics and social relations find a common origin and, above all, the principles of their harmonious organization. I shall demonstrate these ideas through an analysis of the image of“the voyage towards the homeland” (peregrinatio ad patriam).

Metaphors, domains and embodiment

Investigations of metaphorical meaning constitution and meaning (in-) variance have revealed the significance of semantic and semiotic domains and the contexts within which they function as basis for the grounding of metaphorical meaning. In this article some of the current views concerning the grounding of metaphorical meaning in experience and embodiment are explored. My provisional agreement with Lakoff, Johnson and others about the “conceptual” nature of metaphor rests on an important caveat, viz. that this bodily based conceptual structure which lies at the basis of linguistic articulations of metaphor, is grounded in a deeper ontic structure of the world and of human experience. It is the “metaphorical” (actually “analogical”) ontological structure of this grounding that is of interest for the line of argumentation followed in this article. Because Johnson, Lakoff and other’s proposal to ground metaphorical meaning in embodiment and neural processes is open to being construed as subjectivist and materialist, I shall attempt to articulate the contours of an alternative theory of conceptual metaphor, meaning and embodiment which counteracts these possibilities. This theory grounds metaphorical meaning and meaning change in an ontological and anthropological framework which recognises the presence and conditioning functioning of radially ordered structures for reality. These categorisations in which humankind, human knowledge and reality participate, condition and constrain (ground) analogical and metaphorical meaning transfer, cross-domain mappings, and blends in cognition and in language, provide the basis for the analogical concepts found in these disciplines.

The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism by Anthony John Harding

toward private, subjective desire. The familiar vacillations of Macbeth in I.vii. are placed against the earlier model of split awareness in Tarquin and are compared to the design of sonnet 129. Each of the chapters lucidly examines the historical, theoretical and prac­ tical implications of the definitions of the central issues: conventions, voice, worldbuilding, and character. While postmodern theoretical approaches speak of the text rather than Shakespeare and are unwilling to fall into the intentional fallacy, Wilson easily marvels at Shakespeare’s “imaginative plurality” (147), which deliberately opens up rather than minimalizes inter­ pretative possibilities. The last chapter, “Boundaries,” is a bold attempt to study the problems of his own methodology, the paradoxes and dilemmas inherent in narrative theory, through the lens of Hamlet. Contemporary narrative theory, Wilson claims, has finally supplied the tools to study, or at least more completely articulate, Shakespeare’s complex use of narrative, and reveal (again) how “problem-filled Shakespeare’s texts actually are” (217). At the end of the chapter, he argues that theory is best regarded as a “question-quest” or as “hyperplay” : a mode of exploration which “follows paths rather than seeks destinations as such” (218), a kind of theoretical negative capability. This is an appropriate ending to a chapter that raises many questions about the limitations of narrative theory, especially the difficult issue of mapping interactive and overlapping semiotic domains and boundaries. Although it scants performance theory’s claims (with many of which I am deeply sympathetic) and presents one side of Shakespeare— as master storyteller not as dramatist — Wilson’s return to Shakespeare’s narrative is very persuasive in positing one possible explanation for Shakespeare’s richness, his continuing popularity, and his comprehensibility to a wide range of readers, both general and professional. “Narrative seduces the vision” (19), Wilson confesses early on in his insightful book, and it makes us see the plays differently. He’s right. ire n a R. m a k a r y k / University of Ottawa Anthony John Harding, The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995). xvi, 289. $39.95 cloth. The réanimation of traditional mythological elements in Romantic poetry has always been recognized as an enlistment of their fertile figurative pos­ sibilities in the service of certain new cultural and literary ideologies. Far from picturesque or sentimental paganism, or facile redeification of nature, 362 the Romantic appropriation of myth was a strategy perfectly suited to dra­ matic representations of imaginative epistemology in a changing intellectual and political climate. Or so we have felt able to say in hindsight. And now Anthony Harding provides strong historical confirmation that Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats did understand their reconstructions of fa­ miliar mythology as strategic interventions in that struggle. More generally, Harding urges in his Introduction a revival of myth crit­ icism, grounded in the complex reception or process theory developed most fully by Hans Blumenberg in Work on Myth. Lamenting our languished ap­ preciation of the literary uses of myth, Harding acknowledges that they have been “obscured” and rendered “moribund” by a reductive modernist univer­ salizing archetypalism and “escape from history” he especially associates with the influence of Frye. The means of recovery is presumably a much subtler, harder, and more dynamically historicized Blumenbergian myth criticism that affirms the metaphoricity, the contingency, and the alwaysalready -opportunistic secondariness of any supposed invocation of (“working on” ) traditional belief systems. Harding’s first chapter, for example, identifies in the calculated weird­ ness of themes, language, atmosphere, and endless self-interpreting in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” a specific and subversive engagement with tendencies in late-Enlightenment comparative mythography. At issue in this background of controversy were the rival claims of natural and revealed religion, and syncretic theory about “primitive” belief, shamanic vision, and other traditions. Dovetailing as these debates did with Coleridge’s own curiosity about unusual mental states of possession or inspiration and the authenticity or credibility of the poetic imagination, and with his own theological sympathies, they become the basis for what Harding calls “a rad­ ically indeterminate poem about the very nature of myth” (56). Harding’s later chapter on the polysemous “Christabel” turns by...

Existential Subjectivity on Trial: <i>The Crying of Lot 49</i> and the Politics of Despair

Can existential subjectivity still constitute itself once the individual and the socius are symbiotically dissolved in the self-emptying commodity-signs of which contemporary American culture consists? This is the question posed by Thomas Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). Protagonist Oedipa Maas, as her name implies, is on the Lacanian Oedipal cusp between the Imaginary and Symbolic Orders. Upon leaving Kinneret-Among-the-Pines, California–where she has lived a one-dimensional life of Tupperware and fondue parties with her husband, Wendell Mucho Maas–she leaves behind the flat but stable referents that have defined her existence, and now she must find her way in a new and frightening semiotic domain. In San Narciso, where she goes to execute the will of her former lover, corporate entrepreneur Pierce Inverarity, and later in San Francisco, where she spends the night wandering alone, her experiences echo Kerouac's On the Road, with a twist: the America she discovers has become a proliferation of self-emptying commodity-signs circulating in an endless profusion that anticipates Jean Baudrillard's notion of simulacra and Umberto Eco's concept of the hyperreal. These signs–which sell themselves as fetishized abstractions, as non-threatening substitutes for, and thus protection against, existential experience–are cultural productions, and the novel is organized around Oedipa's desperate attempt to decipher them, not only so she can know the culture in which she lives, but so she can reconstitute her own selfhood. For in Lot 49, the collective escape from existential subjectivity is a cultural fait accompli, and, in the person of Oedipa Maas, the possibility of its reconstruction is put on trial.

Self-Representation in Byron and Turner

In his widely noted Structuralist Poetics, which first appeared fourteen years ago, Jonathan Culler (1975) reaffirmed a traditional assumption about the difference between pictures and texts by firmly placing icons outside the domain of semiotics. Icons differ markedly from other signs, he wrote, because they represent objects by means of actual resemblance rather than arbitrary or conventional association (ibid.: 16).1 Yet recent studies of the visual arts and their relation to literature show that semiotics can substantially enhance our understanding of this relation, that we can move well beyond merely formal, atmospheric, or thematic correspondences between pictures and texts when we see how both of them use systems of signification to represent the world.2 This essay concerns the systems of signification that Byron and Turner use to represent themselves. I connect the two figures because Turner himself did so by linking passages from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage to several of his paintings during the years from 1818 to 1844. But this is not a study of influence or illustration. Turner's periodic quoting of Childe Harold has led me rather to search Turner's own work for signs of something corresponding to the self-expressive character of Byron's celebrated quest romance, and in a larger sense to ask what kinds of self-representation are possible in literature and painting. To

Para leer el discurso político

Este texto es un ensayo preliminar en torno a la naturaleza y los componentes del discurso político, dominio semiótico que será objeto de un detenido análisis en una investigación en curso, cuya elaboración comparto con Oscar Quezada. Aquí se trata ahora de explorar, de tantear, de definir el objeto de trabajo y de exponer algunas consideraciones generales.