scholarly journals Multimodal Technologies in LEGO House: A Social Semiotic Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Cowan
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Digital Cameras ◽  
Opportunities For Learning ◽  
Border Areas ◽  
Semiotic Perspective ◽  
Play Space ◽  
Gains And Losses

Children’s playworlds are a complex interweaving of modes, with the border areas between the digital and non-digital often becoming increasingly blurred. Growing in popularity and prevalence, multimodal technologies blending digital and non-digital elements present novel opportunities for designers of toys and play-spaces as well as being of interest to researchers of young children’s contemporary play and learning. Opened in Denmark in September 2017, LEGO House defines itself as the ‘Home of the Brick’, a public attraction aiming to support play, creativity and learning through multiple interactive LEGO experiences spanning digital and non-digital forms. Offering a rich context for considering multimodal perspectives on contemporary play, this article reports on a range of multimodal technologies featured in LEGO House, including digital cameras, scanners, and interactive tables used in combination with traditional LEGO bricks. Three LEGO House experiences are considered from a multimodal social semiotic perspective, focusing on the affordances of multimodal technologies for play, and the process of transduction across modes, in order to explore the liminal border-areas where digital and non-digital play are increasingly mixed. This article proposes that LEGO House presents an innovative ‘third space’ that creates opportunities for playful interaction with multimodal technologies. LEGO House can be seen as part of a growing recognition of the power of play, both in its own right and in relation to learning, acknowledging that meaning-making happens in informal times and places that are not positioned as direct acts of teaching. Furthermore, it is suggested that multimodal technologies embedded into the play-space expand opportunities for learning in new ways, whilst highlighting that movement between digital and non-digital forms always entails both gains and losses: A matter which needs to be explored. Highlighting the opportunities for meaning-making in informal, play-based settings such as LEGO House therefore has the potential to recognise and give value to playful meaning-making with multimodal technologies which may otherwise be taken for granted or go unnoticed. In this way, experiences such as those found in LEGO House can contribute towards conceptualisations of learning which support children to develop the playfully creative skills and knowledge required for the digital age.

Ethnography Is an Option

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacey Philbrick Yadav
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Opportunities For Learning

Reflecting on her own uneven experience carrying out fieldwork in Yemen, Stacey Philbrick Yadav highlights the advantages of ethnography and interpretative methods when working in settings or on questions related to meaning-making. The chapter argues that the tools of ethnographic research can help to reframe what positivists might regard as mistakes into opportunities for learning and reassessment.

The heroes of the pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 07 (01) ◽  
pp. 9-29
Author(s):  
Sebastian Moreno Barreneche
Keyword(s):  
Health Economics ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Construction Process ◽  
Semiotic Perspective ◽  
Economics And Politics

Besides its impact on health, economics, and politics, the COVID-19 pandemic was the source of phenomena of a discursive nature, specifically regarding the solutions found by societies to make sense of the crisis caused by the uncontrolled spread of the virus. This article analyzes from a socio-semiotic perspective the construction process of the collective identity of “the healthcare workers” during the pandemic. After generally introducing semiotics as the discipline interested in meaning-making and signification, the article studies four semiotic mechanisms present in the discursive construction of any collective identity. It then moves on to its main goal: the analysis of the functioning of those four mechanisms in the specific case of “the healthcare workers,” a collective identity that, since the beginning of 2020, has been central in the narratives that emerged around the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, it should render visible the semiotic mechanisms of segmentation, actorialization, generalization, and axiologization.

Colors of the Past: Archive, Art, and Amnesia in a Digital Age

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1771-1781
Author(s):  
Santanu Das
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Gains And Losses

Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.

Online Media and Religion in America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Bajan ◽  
Heidi A. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Sociocultural Development

New and emerging media has played a pivotal role in Christianity throughout history. In early times, the Christian message was disseminated directly from Jesus and his followers to growing numbers of worshippers in the ancient world. This unmediated form of Christianity, while effective as a method of proselytization due to its immediacy and intimacy, was limited by how far its early disciples could travel to spread the Gospel of Christ. As communication technology developed through a series of paradigm shifts spread over several centuries of human sociocultural development, Christianity capitalized on these shifts in a variety of ways. This fostered significant structural changes to the religion due to steadily increasing levels of technologically rooted mediation over time. In its most current form, Christianity is mediated through a variety of secular digital media with online capabilities. Media are utilized by increasing numbers of Christian churches throughout America due to their potential as platforms for efficient dissemination and ability to reach large numbers of worshippers with relative ease. As churches integrate secular digital media into their structures, a third space of interconnectivity emerges in which the boundaries between on and offline lived religious practice are bridged; blended; and at times, blurred, depending on the context and level of mediation. This third space that emerges is quantified as a digital religion in which Christianity becomes redefined as a cultural practice and site of collective and individual meaning making.

scholarly journals Reconsidering the contents of interpreters’ notes: A human-centered approach to classification

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Anna Sasaki
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Note Taking ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Semiotic Perspective ◽  
New Perspective

AbstractThis paper tackles the issue of the lack of a substantially new approach to classifying the interpreters’ notes. In my paper, I highlight the fact that the researchers in the field are yet to agree on the contents of interpreters’ notes, and that is, in my opinion, the problem that is numerously stumbled upon in consecutive interpretation research in general and note-taking research in particular. Not only do researchers invent new classifications within an excising paradigm, sometimes they contradict each other presenting different definitions for the same concepts. This paper attempts to solve the issue by introducing a new perspective on the contents of interpreters’ notes by adapting the human-centered approach and turning to the “writers” of the notes, the interpreters. The interpreter trainees who participated in this research were interviewed to obtain an in-depth understanding of what is included in interpreters’ notes. Under the semiotic perspective, which assumes both linguistic and non-linguistic notes as a system of signs, I classified the interpreters’ notes based on the subject’s comments to the notes they had written. This retrospective approach unveiled how interpreter trainees perceive their notes which prompt meaning-making and facilitate the memory when delivering interpretation.

scholarly journals Towards a linguistic theory of translation as re-contextualisation and a Third Space phenomenon

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliane House
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Functional Approach ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Sociocultural Contexts ◽  
Linguistic Account

The article suggests a theory of translation as re-contextualisation and a ‘Third Space’ phenomenon supplementing the ideas recently suggested in the cultural branch of translation studies with a linguistic account and building a bridge between the two. The view proposed here is rooted in a functional approach to translation. Such an approach is fruitful because it implies a systematic consideration of the context of translation units and the embeddedness of language as a meaning-making tool in micro-situational and macro-sociocultural contexts. The categorically different nature of Third Space in covert and overt translation is exemplified and explained with reference to House ’s theory of translation as re-contextualisation. Finally, possible changes in conceptualizing translation as a Third Space phenomenon are mentioned with a view to the growing dominance of English as a global lingua franca.

Doctoral writing: learning to write and give feedback across cultures

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Carter ◽  
Qiyu Sun ◽  
Farrah Jabeen
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Academic English ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Constructive Feedback ◽  
Emotional Detachment ◽  
Writing Feedback ◽  
Doctoral Writing

Purpose This study aims to broaches several endemic challenges for academics who support doctoral writing: writers are emotionally protective of their own writing; writing a thesis in English as a second language is a challenging, complex task; and advising across cultures is delicate. Giving constructive feedback kindly, but with the rigour needed to raise writing quality can seem daunting. Addressing those issues, the authors offer a novel way of working with writing feedback across cultures. Design/methodology/approach The case study research team of two candidates and one supervisor stumbled onto an effective way of working across cultural and institutional difference. What began as advisory feedback on doctoral writing became an effective collaborative analysis of prose meaning-making. The authors reflected separately and collectively on how this happened, analysed reflections and this narrative inquiry approach led to theories of use to writing feedback practice. Findings The authors cross between theory and praxis, showing that advisors and supervisors can create Bhabha’s post-colonial third space (a promising social space that sits between cultures, beyond hierarchies, where new ways of thinking can be collaboratively generated) as a working environment for international doctoral writing feedback. Within this zone, Brechtian alienation, a theory from theatre practice, is applied to prompt emotional detachment that enables focus on writing clearly in academic English. Research limitations/implications Arguably the writing feedback session the authors described remains bound by the generic expectations of a western education system. The study is exegetical, humanities reading of practice, rather than a social science gathering of empirical data. Yet the humanities approach suits the point that a change of language, attitude and theory can give positive leverage with doctoral writing feedback. Practical implications The authors provide a novel practical method of supporting international doctoral candidates’ writing with feedback across cultures. It entails attracting the writers’ interest in theory and persuading them, via theory, to look objectively and freshly at their own writing. Also backed by theory, a theoretical cross-cultural space allows for discussion about differences and similarities. Detachment from proprietorial emotions and cross-cultural openness enables productive work amongst the mechanics of clear academic English text. Originality/value Underpinned by sociocultural and metacognitive approaches to learning, reflection from student and supervisor perspectives (the data), and oriented by theory, the authors propose another strategy for supporting doctoral writing across cultures. The authors demonstrate a third space approach for writing feedback across cultures, showing how to operationalise theory.

Accelerating semogenesis: an ecosocial approach to photography

2019 ◽  
pp. 147035721988776
Author(s):  
Christian Mosbæk Johannessen ◽  
Morten Boeriis
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Digital Camera ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Digital Cameras ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
Time Frames

Michael Halliday and Christian Matthiessen’s term ‘semogenesis’ refers to how meaning potentials are created through processes on many co-occurring time frames, most prominently those referred to as ‘phylogenesis’, ‘ontogenesis’ and ‘logogenesis’. The concept was originally infused with linguistic concern in an attempt to link a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) account of the lexico-grammatical and semantic strata with lived experience. In this article, the authors rethink the concept in order to (1) broaden its scope to the concerns of multimodal studies, and (2) accommodate how digital technology impacts on our communication practices. They do so by discussing semogenesis from a vantage point of ‘ecosocial semiotics’, a perspective that asks us to blend both sociological, technological, material and biological understandings of human activity. Taking digital photography as an example, the authors argue that digital media afford an acceleration of processes of multimodal semogenesis on all semogenetic time frames. Picking up the notion of ‘microgenesis’, a fourth, faster-than-logogenesis time frame that serves as a placeholder for any process enabling logogenesis, they suggest that this acceleration is driven by the global-scale introduction of digital technology. Through a discussion of select examples from the history of photography, specifically contrasting nascent photographic practice with contemporary photography, they propose that the development from camera to digital camera and the subsequent consolidation in recent decades of digital cameras into smartphones has had a profound impact, not only on practices of photography, but also on the processes of meaning making with photographic material.

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