# chap 10: Composition Composition: semiotic modes articulate space Arranging things: page, canvas, city, room. Based physical on sense of balance. Makes it a physical and intuitive process. 198 Add kinesthetic, material, embedded. But this is also semiotic process as balance can only be shown by specifying the meaning it makes visible. 198 This aligns cohesion with meaning, not just form. Semiotic cohesion. Salience factors, 198 Sense of balance informs semiotic activity. > We can look at a couple of screens from lit crit. Carpenter. Others. > Look at web pages for similar: what's valued, how that value is represented semiotically > Given opposition and centrality and margin as semiotic affordances, what do we make of the limited possibility of the academic text we write? Single column of page width. Where to the limited elements sit: heads, footnotes. > How about bureaucratic docs? ## Placement - Up - Down - Along vertical and horizontal lines - Left - Right - Foreground - Background - W/in frames - Super imposed - Centrality Pp 200-1 Can centrality and margin be oppositional? Can opposition be synthetic? What if we recast the tree of power as central and margin? What semiotic meanings can be made of network diagrams? There are choices made by designers. Front and back. Consider the campus and placement of facades, fronts, entry points. Op 210 - 211: weakly polarize