Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design
We're using this text as a practical supplement to the other texts. Social semiotics is at root a practice, as is semiosis itself. Reading Images is a guide to that practice.
The introduction is excellent for thinking about a practical semiotics - semiotics as sign-making - and an analytical approach to images already designed and presented. They present a summary of the sign:
- The sign is a product of process of sign making in which the person in a social context selects or uses the most apt resources to make meaning - This process goes on externally as articulation and internally as interpretation. - It is always motivated - It is always laced up in ideology. Meaning making is used to enforce and convey social power by controlling aptness, resources, normalization. - ...
Chap 4: Representation and Interaction: designing the position of the viewer