Semiotics

  • study of sign process - semiosis

    any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning

    — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiosis

  • compared to linguistics, semiotics take into account non-linguistic signs
  • signs/sign systems are classified by how they are transmitted (their medium) - called modality
    • syntactics is semiotics dealing with linguistics signs and syntax
    • pictorial semiotics is semiotics rooted in art history/theory

      pictorial semiotics focuses on the properties of pictures in a general sense, and on how the artistic conventions of images can be interpreted through pictorial codes

      — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

  • encoding and decoding are important part of semiotics - to transfer a sign, it has to be encoded by sender, and decoded by receiver
Information Aesthetics
  • influenced by Cybernetics, Claude Shannon, communication theory, Birkhoff's semiotics