Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Place semiotics and
Nexus Analysis
Every semiotic act (verbal or non-verbal) is placed
within a place and a context of social relations
(Scollon and Scollon 2003)
Nexus of practices and nexus analysis as semiotic
perspectives (Scollon 2001)
Geo-semiotics: social actors, place semiotics,
interaction orders, visual semiotics in places (Scollon
and Scollon 2003)
Mediational means and analyzing mediated social
action (Norris and Jones 2005)
Hypermodal traversals in digital media, chronotope
and heterochrony (Lemke 2009a)
While multimodality
explains the textual
organizations, nexus
analysis supports the
socio-cultural view.
Analysis of the social
contexts and the
collaborative practices
provides a rhetorical
approach to placemaking,
uncovers the
social relations of
power and
organization.
The Systemic
Functional
Framework
Ideational, interpersonal and textual meta-functions
(Halliday 1978, 2007)
Semiotic resources, meaning potentials, context of
situation (Halliday 1978, 2007)
Text as a social construct and as a process (Halliday
and Hasan 1985)
Field, tenor, mode (Halliday 1978, Lemke 2009b).
Design, discourse and genre as semiotic relations
(Kress, 2010)
The three metafunctions
offer an
analytical framework to
analyze the meaning
potentials in particular
contexts. Virtual places
are considered as
objects of textual
analysis. The analysis
frames the field of
communication, its
participants, and the
channels by which
signs are constructed.
The Socio-cultural
Perspectives
Phenomenological anthropology (Pink 2011)
‘Affordances’ in relation to perceptual processes
rather than as a set of rules and representations that
can be categorized and differentiated through distinct
sensory channels (Pink 2011)
The problematic notion of the ‘social’ and the power
relation that societies are built upon (Latour’s 2005)
The functionalist linguistic framework should be
supported with poststructuralist techniques of
analysis that emphasize the production and
circulation of discourses (Poynton 1993)
Modes and meanings of virtual environments with a
socio-cultural perspective (Poster 2007 [1994])
Culture of appropriation, supplementing social
semiotics with socio-cultural theories (Gilje 2008)
Multimodal sociosemiotic
perspective
can still fall
shorthanded in the
study of dynamic social
relations. The
meanings of
affordances, as well as
modes and resources,
are re-build through
interaction.
Methodologically, this
requires a poststructuralist
twist to
semiotics, and
integration with
ethnomethodological
approaches and sociocultural
theories.
Table 3. 1 Theories and concepts in Social Semiotics that are relevant to the analysis of collaborative place-making
in SL
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