scholarly journals Visual Semiotics and Real Events

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inna Semetsky

This article adopts a semiotic (and edusemiotic) perspective that abolishes all binary divisions in favour of the process of semiosis that ensures a continuous translation of signs into other signs via the dynamic relations formed by the human mind, cultural artefacts, and events in real life. The mind, in edusemiotics, partakes of unconscious ideas in the form of mental images. As for culture, the field of communication phenomena calls for, according to Yuri Lotman, the identification of specific semiotic systems representing their ‘languages’, including non-verbal signs such as images, pictures, and other art forms that function as cultural texts. The methodology of bricolage (conceptualized in educational research by Joe Kincheloe) combines hermeneutics with narratology, and ‘reading’ images becomes imperative for advancing critical pedagogy. The article examines and interprets selected images, including those belonging to the low end of popular culture, and connects them with the exemplarily significant event at the level of socio-cultural reality.The paradoxical self-referential ‘logic’ is the prerogative of semiotic reason that constantly reflects on – thus bringing to cognition and transforming – our often unconscious assumptions, beliefs and habits thus contributing to the construction of subjectivity that uses critical reason informed by signs, which include the bricolage of images.

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade ◽  
Ernest Morrell

Synthesizing literature from critical pedagogy, sociocultural psychology and cultural studies with popular cultural texts and experiences from actual classroom practice, this article conceptualizes the critical teaching of popular culture as a viable strategy to increase academic and critical literacies in urban secondary classrooms. Relying on scholarship that views youth popular culture as a powerful, but often times underutilized, point of intervention for schools, these authors discuss the impact of using youth popular culture to reconnect with otherwise disenfranchised schooling populations. The authors rebut criticisms associated with the teaching of popular culture by showing how teachers can simultaneously honor and draw upon the sociocultural practices of their students while also adhering to state and national standards. Further, the article demonstrates the social relevance, academic worthiness, and intellectual merit of hip-hop artists such as the controversial Eminem and popular film texts such as the Godfather trilogy. They conclude with a call for postmodern critical educational leaders—vigilant advocates for students who are willing to combine academic content knowledge with a commitment to an engaging multicultural curriculum.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Robert C. Koons

In De Anima Book III, Aristotle subscribed to a theory of formal identity between the human mind and the extra-mental objects of our understanding. This has been one of the most controversial features of Aristotelian metaphysics of the mind. I offer here a defense of the Formal Identity Thesis, based on specifically epistemological arguments about our knowledge of necessary or essential truths.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (13) ◽  
pp. 4289
Author(s):  
Daniel Martinez-Marquez ◽  
Sravan Pingali ◽  
Kriengsak Panuwatwanich ◽  
Rodney A. Stewart ◽  
Sherif Mohamed

Most accidents in the aviation, maritime, and construction industries are caused by human error, which can be traced back to impaired mental performance and attention failure. In 1596, Du Laurens, a French anatomist and medical scientist, said that the eyes are the windows of the mind. Eye tracking research dates back almost 150 years and it has been widely used in different fields for several purposes. Overall, eye tracking technologies provide the means to capture in real time a variety of eye movements that reflect different human cognitive, emotional, and physiological states, which can be used to gain a wider understanding of the human mind in different scenarios. This systematic literature review explored the different applications of eye tracking research in three high-risk industries, namely aviation, maritime, and construction. The results of this research uncovered the demographic distribution and applications of eye tracking research, as well as the different technologies that have been integrated to study the visual, cognitive, and attentional aspects of human mental performance. Moreover, different research gaps and potential future research directions were highlighted in relation to the usage of additional technologies to support, validate, and enhance eye tracking research to better understand human mental performance.


2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gad Saad

An evolutionary lens can inform the study of cultural forms in a myriad of ways. These can be construed as adaptations, as exaptations (evolutionary byproducts), as gene–culture interactions, as memes, or as fossils of the human mind. Products of popular culture (e.g., song lyrics, movie themes, romance novels) are to evolutionary cultural theorists what fossils and skeletal remains represent to paleontologists. Although human minds do not fossilize or skeletonize (the cranium does), the cultural products created by human minds do. By identifying universally recurring themes for a given cultural form (song lyrics and collective wisdoms in the current article), spanning a wide range of cultures and time periods, one is able to test key tenets of evolutionary psychology. In addition to using evolutionary psychology to understand the contents of popular culture, the discipline can itself be studied as a contributor to popular culture. Beginning with the sociobiology debates in the 1970s, evolutionary informed analyses of human behavior have engendered great fascination and animus among the public at large. Following a brief summary of studies that have explored the diffusion of the evolutionary behavioral sciences within specific communities (e.g., the British media), I offer a case analysis of the penetration of evolutionary psychology within the blogosphere, specifically the blog community hosted by Psychology Today.


2020 ◽  
pp. 83-94
Author(s):  
Łukasz Muniowski

Rick and Morty, one of the most popular presently-airing American TV series, is deeply rooted in popular culture. Each episode is full of allusions and references to other cultural texts, accentuating the show’s own status as a pop cultural text. This article analyzes the third episode of the fourth season of Rick and Morty, “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty,” using Stefan Schubert’s concept of narrative instability. The episode mocks twist films by introducing a ridiculous number of twists, eventually making the viewer immune to the element of surprise usually brought on by what Schubert understands as unstable moments. In doing so, the episode also emphasizes the overuse of that narrative device in recent decades in films, TV series and video games. “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty” deconstructs twist films while sticking to the rules of the sub-genre and remaining entertaining in its own right. Instability can pose quite a problem for the showrunners, who usually have to adjust to the norms of serialized storytelling. By using Schubert’s theory of narrative instability to discuss a singular episode of a series, I hope to demonstrate the extent to which this quality has permeated modern storytelling. The episode highlights the effects of over-reliance on narrative instability as a tool, as even the most elaborate form is not enough to make up for the lack of essence. This is exactly what Rick criticizes in the episode, when he states: “stealing stuff is about the stuff, not the stealing.”


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
George F. R. Ellis

Both bottom-up and top-down causation occur in the hierarchy of structure and causation. A key feature is multiple realizability of higher level functions, and consequent existence of equivalence classes of lower level variables that correspond to the same higher level state. Five essentially different classes of top-down influence can be identified, and their existence demonstrated by many real-world examples. They are: algorithmic top-down causation; top-down causation via non-adaptive information control, top-down causation via adaptive selection, top-down causation via adaptive information control and intelligent top-down causation (the effect of the human mind on the physical world). Through the mind, abstract entities such as mathematical structures have causal power. The causal slack enabling top-down action to take place lies in the structuring of the system so as to attain higher level functions; in the way the nature of lower level elements is changed by context, and in micro-indeterminism combined with adaptive selection. Understanding top-down causation can have important effects on society. Two cases will be mentioned: medical/healthcare issues, and education—in particular, teaching reading and writing. In both cases, an ongoing battle between bottom-up and top-down approaches has important consequences for society.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joerg Fingerhut

This paper argues that the still-emerging paradigm of situated cognition requires a more systematic perspective on media to capture the enculturation of the human mind. By virtue of being media, cultural artifacts present central experiential models of the world for our embodied minds to latch onto. The paper identifies references to external media within embodied, extended, enactive, and predictive approaches to cognition, which remain underdeveloped in terms of the profound impact that media have on our mind. To grasp this impact, I propose an enactive account of media that is based on expansive habits as media-structured, embodied ways of bringing forth meaning and new domains of values. We apply such habits, for instance, when seeing a picture or perceiving a movie. They become established through a process of reciprocal adaptation between media artifacts and organisms and define the range of viable actions within such a media ecology. Within an artifactual habit, we then become attuned to a specific media work (e.g., a TV series, a picture, a text, or even a city) that engages us. Both the plurality of habits and the dynamical adjustments within a habit require a more flexible neural architecture than is addressed by classical cognitive neuroscience. To detail how neural and media processes interlock, I will introduce the concept of neuromediality and discuss radical predictive processing accounts that could contribute to the externalization of the mind by treating media themselves as generative models of the world. After a short primer on general media theory, I discuss media examples in three domains: pictures and moving images; digital media; architecture and the built environment. This discussion demonstrates the need for a new cognitive media theory based on enactive artifactual habits—one that will help us gain perspective on the continuous re-mediation of our mind.


Author(s):  
Jozi Joseph Thwala

The focus of this research work on selected descriptive of images refers to the analytic survey of metaphor and simile. They are selected, defined, explained and interpreted. Their significances in bringing about poetic diction, licence, meaning, message and themes are highlighted. They are fundamental figures of speech that implicitly and explicitly display the emotive value, connotative meaning, literariness and language skills. The poetic images reflect and represent real life situations through poetic skills and meanings. The literary criticism, comparative and textual analysis is evident when the objects are looked at from animate to inanimate and inanimate to animate. They serve as basic methodologies that are backing the theories and strategies on selected figures of speech. Imagery is the use of words that brings picture of the mind of the receiver or recipient and appeal to the senses. It is, however, manifested in various forms for resemblances, contrasts and comparisons. Artistic language through images revealed poetic views, assertion and facts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Sharavina Delani

Literary works, such as novel, usually comes from the writer’s feeling; it could be the feeling of love, frustrations, angers, satisfactions, disappointments, satire, and many other feelings towards an individual, social, organizations, even the government. A novel could also be some kind of warning towards the readers so that they could be cautious if there are any similar events happen in their real life. The main objective of this research explains the American manipulative leadership and the American cultural values seen in Ender’s Game and to analyze the effect of American Manipulative Leadership towards its Subordinate shows by Ender’s Game. The researcher uses the qualitative method to analyze the primary data and the supporting data using content analysis to interpret the images, symbols, and words.    This undergraduate thesis concludes two major points. Firstly, American manipulative leadership uses two values; which are risk-taking and the future, change, and progress and forgotten two other values, directness/openness/honesty and freedom of American Cultural values. Secondly, American manipulative leaderships also affect the subordinate psychological condition. And novel can also be called as a popular culture due to its enormous achievement and its consumption by the mass.


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