Social Semiotics
Visual Social Semiotics: Understanding How Still Images Make Meaning This last post is on Social Semiotics, which is a method of analyzing situations with context to infer their underlying meanings. One way this can be applied is with images, and when a picture is worth a thousand words, there's a lot it could potentially be saying. Social Semiotics would be a way of determining that meaning. With images specifically in mind, a lot of development for the methodology was done by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen. Social Semiotics examines how signs and symbols, including visual elements, contribute to communication, and can help us better understand how specific contexts influence a situation. There are some guidelines to Social Semiotics that help us understand and utilize the methodology. People see things in the context of their environment and provide meanings behind those objects. This is especially true if we look at composition. As an example, the placement o...
