520 research outputs found
Towards a grammar of manipulated photographs: the social semiotics of digital photo manipulation
Full text linkThis article explores the visual grammatical implications of contemporary digital photo manipulation. The rapid and broad distribution of photographs via social media is leading to the conventionalisation of new social practices in photography (Johannessen and Boeriis 2021), including the widespread use of image filters and other types of image manipulation. The smartphone camera has become a constantly available augmentation of our sensory motor apparatus and of our social environment (Blaagaard 2013; Frosh 2015; Han et al. 2017) and, consequently, manipulated photography is becoming an almost dialogical practice of expressing thoughts and emotions in real-time among individuals on a potentially very large scale (Boeriis 2021).From a point of departure in multimodal social semiotics (Kress and Hodge 1988; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001), this article explores how different visual meaning-making resources are involved in manipulating digital photographs. Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar (2020) serves as a framework for the analysis and discussion of the options available for photo manipulation in digital software, both specialised for social media (e.g., Instagram or FaceApp) and for professional photography (e.g., Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom). Thus, the article unfolds the meaning-making of photo manipulations by relating different effects to the grammatical categories affected by different adjustments
Book Review: Social Semiotics – Key Figures, New Directions
No full textBook Title: Social Semiotics – Key Figures, New DirectionsBook Authors: Thomas Hestbæk Andersen, Morten Boeriis, Eva Maagerø & Elise SeipTønnessen2015. Routledge. ISBN: 978-0-415-71210-1, 174 pages, price £125.0
Precious Play in Morten Søndergaard’s Ordapotek
Full text linkAfter touching upon some theoretical aspects of play/game – text analogy, the article focuses on the manifestations of play in the project Wordpharmacy by the Danish author Morten Søndergaard, including its not problem-free relation to the image of the curious child at play
Emotive validity and the eye in the hand – Representing visual reality with digital technology
Full text linkSmartphone photography and social media are central in our everyday social lives, and they have paved the way for extremely fast distribution and sharing of our digital photographic texts. The new technology has profound consequences for the pace at which conventionalisation of new social practices can take place, and, consequently, at this point in history our understanding of visual manipulation is undergoing radical changes.This article explores the social semiotic concept visual validity presented by Kress and van Leeuwen in the 3rd edition of their influential book Reading Images, the grammar of visual design (2020) and discusses in what ways this concept is a fertile new approach to comprehending and analysing the contemporary digitally manipulated reality of vernacular photography. The engagement with the social semiotic theory is anchored in the author’s own experiences as a practising photographer and observations of students’ practical and theoretical work with photography.It is argued in the article that a new category of represented visual reality, emotive coding orientation, needs to be added to the social semiotic theory to encompass the perspective that photographs may not convey a naturalistic fidelity to how a depicted situation ‘really looked’ at the time it was photographed, but rather convey an emotional fidelity to how the depicted situation ‘really felt’ to the photographer.The article proceeds to pursue how we share photographic images as bodily experiences with the camera as an extension of our sensory motor apparatus, and consequently a part of our distributed cognitive system and of our social environment. The concept photographetic empathy (derived from Abercrombie’s (1964) notion ‘phonetic empathy’) is introduced to elucidate how the smartphone camera enhances a sensibility to a (more) bodily experience of photography caused by empathetic reverberation through digital sensorimotor imitation.<br/
How multimodal structures constitute organization
No full textThis chapter demonstrates how a nuanced multimodal social semiotic (MMSS) analytical approach can be used in organisational contexts, offering specialized methods for close analysis of how physical and digital structures shape individuals' behaviour. It investigates how organisation is multimodally constituted through the semiotic structures instantiated in shop layouts by analysing how stakeholders interact with the designed environment of online and offline shops.Multimodal social semiotic analyses typically focus on the strategic design of the text in itself (in a communicational context), whereas this addresses the text in use by focusing on the complex interplay of multiple semiotic resources and the actions afforded, instigated, and regulated by these resources in the structural semiotic design. The relation between the designed structures and the actions of customers in shops is investigated with a particular focus on search behaviours and strategies. This is done through an analysis that combines the social semiotic framework of textual metafunctional meaning (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004; Kress and van Leeuwen 2021) with eye-tracking recordings of two actual instances of shopping situations – in a physical brick-and-mortar bookstore and in an online bookstore, demonstrating how MMSS analysis provides a window for understanding how the organisation is constituted in and by its structural design
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