- Semiotics is an activity 4 - Signs are resources. Resources are signifiers. 4 - Semiotic potential 4 - Signs are always motivated as being chosen as the most apt. Kress, Literacy - Affordance. 4-5
Inflection- how an element changes but still remains an element across time or situations. Eg different inflictions of separators. 23
Register. A set of choices that typify a context is register. 14. - - Register is how resources are used in different social practices and how they are regulated. 14. Eg how framing works in business buildings v restaurants. Framing in ads v educational materials. Genres of ads.
Multimodal semiotic principles. 18. Elements are different but the semiotic work is the same.
Doing semiotics
Create semotic inventories. We create semiotic inventories of signifiers and signifieds for specific purposes addressing partial domains. 5ff. We create semiotic inventories of signifiers and signifieds for specific purposes addressing partial domains. 5ff.
- Collect samples of what we want to study. Walking, framing, etc - Catalogue the examples into kinds. Drawn from what signals we can determine. I guess. Pp 8-9 - Order the observations. By type and modulation. 13 presents summary by way of network diagram.
The next move is to see how the meaning potential we have developed applies in other modes or genres. 14. <b>Create system diagrams</b>. - In creating the system diagrams he's construing the syntagms and paradigms of the system. Refine this idea. Plot it against syntax and selection.
The third step. - the next step is to what the practices mean.
Here, Van Leeuwen jumps from a resource (org of desks) to the semiotic potential of that resource for power. Who can see what. 17 and elsewhere. I'm not quite sure how he gets there necessarily - except through a consideration of the material affordance. Thus is to say that there seems to be a leap from identifying the practices / signs to the ideological signifieds.
Another way of seeing this is as less a leap and more as the next move of the analyst. To discover that the framing practices mean, Ask those who occupy the spaces. 20ff at this point it becomes ethnography. Van Leeuwen points out that semiotics is interdisciplinary.
Conclusions
Application. What does framing look like on Internet? D2l. Wiki. Blog. Are their invisible frames as in areas that we know exist but are off-limits or that we're kept inside? Open source proponents speak of walled gardens and gated communities. That is segregation. W/in walls, we have separation by function (grades, Dropbox, discussion). W/in discussion do we see separation? The segregation signifies control of students by teacher. Segregated from the wider net. Links out bring in validated material. The segregation is two way: Students can't get out, but others can't see in.