Explore the vast range of titles available.

Shortlisted for the BAAL Book Prize 2017 Emoji have gone from being virtually unknown to being a central topic in internet communication. What is behind the rise and rise of these winky faces, clinking glasses and smiling poos? Given the sheer variety of verbal communication on the internet and English's still-controversial role as lingua mundi for the web, these icons have emerged as a compensatory universal language. The Semiotics of Emoji looks at what is officially the world's fastest-growing form of communication. Emoji, the colourful symbols and glyphs that represent everything from frowning disapproval to red-faced shame, are fast becoming embedded into digital communication. Controlled by a centralized body and regulated across the web, emoji seems to be a language: but is it? The rapid adoption of emoji in such a short span of time makes it a rich study in exploring the functions of language. Professor Marcel Danesi, an internationally-known expert in semiotics, branding and communication, answers the pertinent questions. Are emoji making us dumber? Can they ultimately replace language? Will people grow up emoji literate as well as digitally native? Can there be such a thing as a Universal Visual Language? Read this book for the answers.

Why do people put indelible marks on their bodies in an era characterized by constant cultural change? How do tattoos as semiotic resources convey meaning? What goes on behind the scenes in a tattoo studio? How do people negotiate the informal career of tattoo artist? The Social Semiotics of Tattoos is a study of tattoos and tattooing at a time when the practice is more artistic, culturally relevant, and common than ever before. By discussing shifts within the practices of tattooing over the past several decades, Martin chronicles the cultural turn in which tattooists have become known as tattoo artists, the tattoo gun turns into the tattoo machine, and standardized tattoo designs are replaced by highly expressive and unique forms of communication with a language of its own. Revealing the full range of meaning-making involved in the visual, written and spoken elements of the act, this volume frames tattoos and tattooing as powerful cultural expressions, symbols, and indexes and by doing so sheds the last hints of tattooing as a deviant practice. Based on a year of full-time ethnographic study of a tattoo studio/art gallery as well as in-depth interviews with tattoo artists and enthusiasts, The Social Semiotics of Tattoos will be of interest to academic researchers of semiotics as well as tattoo industry professional and artists.

This book examines semiotics, meaning-making and the co-construction of relations in transmodal communications. Through the lens of transpositioning - the multiple and interwoven layers of emplacements and positionings that are entailed in communications which cross and transcend the boundaries that have historically shaped our thinking about the world and its inhabitants - the chapters interrogate digital languaging and literacies, and how transmodal communications shape identities, belongings and relationships, with particular attention paid to issues of equity and social justice. The chapter authors consider both transmodalities and critical cosmopolitanism as they analyze empirical data from youth, adults and researchers participating in a project that digitally connects youth to share their lives across diverse and under-resourced global communities. In offering this multi-perspectival, multi-voiced volume, the authors portray and address methodological issues in researching transglobal transmodal communications.

This book offers both a naturalistic and critical theory of signs, minds, and meaning-in-the-world. It provides a reconstructive rather than deconstructive theory of the individual, one which both analytically separates and theoretically synthesizes a range of faculties that are often confused and conflated: agency (understood as a causal capacity), subjectivity (understood as a representational capacity), selfhood (understood as a reflexive capacity), and personhood (understood as a sociopolitical capacity attendant on being an agent, subject, or self). It argues that these facilities are best understood from a semiotic stance that supersedes the usual intentional stance. And, in so doing, it offers a pragmatism-grounded approach to meaning and mediation that is general enough to account for processes that are as embodied and embedded as they are articulated and enminded. In particular, while this theory is thereby focused on human-specific modes of meaning, it also offers a general theory of meaning, such that the agents, subjects and selves in question need not always, or even usually, map onto persons. And while this theory foregrounds agents, persons, subjects and selves, it does this by theorizing processes that often remain in the background of such otherwise erroneously individuated figures: ontologies (akin to culture, but generalized across agentive collectivities), interaction (not only between people, but also between people and things, and anything outside or in-between), and infrastructure (akin to context, but generalized to include mediation at any degree of remove).

Multimodality is one of the most popular and influential semiotic theories for analysing media. However, the application and conceptual anchoring of multimodality often remains geographically and disciplinarily grounded within local systems of thought. New Studies in Multimodality combines the expertise of multimodalists from around the globe, offering novel readings and applications of central concepts in multimodality and inviting innovative synergies between previously disparate schools. Combining perspectives from the most actively developing traditions of theory and research, this book progresses from classic concepts to more empirically and practice-motivated contributions. Contributors engage in mutual dialogue to present new theoretical perspectives and compelling applications to a variety of old and new media. Expanding the basis and scope of multimodality, this volume shows awareness and experience of this field in many disciplines and illustrates how versatile, pervasive and relevant it is for studying today's communication phenomena.

Emoji have gone from being virtually unknown to being a central topic in internet communication. What is behind the rise and rise of these winky faces, clinking glasses and smiling poos? Given the sheer variety of verbal communication on the internet and English's still-controversial role as lingua mundi for the web, these icons have emerged as a compensatory universal language. The Semiotics of Emoji looks at what is officially the world's fastest-growing form of communication. Emoji, the colourful symbols and glyphs that represent everything from frowning disapproval to red-faced shame, are fast becoming embedded into digital communication. Controlled by a centralized body and regulated across the web, emoji seems to be a language: but is it? The rapid adoption of emoji in such a short span of time makes it a rich study in exploring the functions of language. Professor Marcel Danesi, an internationally-known expert in semiotics, branding and communication, answers the pertinent questions. Are emoji making us dumber? Can they ultimately replace language? Will people grow up emoji literate as well as digitally native? Can there be such a thing as a Universal Visual Language? Read this book for the answers.

Multimodality in Writing attempts to generate and apply new theories, disciplines and methods to account for semiotic processes in texts and during text production. It thus showcases new directions in multimodal research and theorizing writing practices from a multimodal perspective. It explores texts, producers of texts, and readers of texts. It also focuses on teaching multimodal text production and writing pedagogy from different domains and disciplines, such as rhetoric and writing composition, architecture, mathematics, film-making, science and the newsroom.Multimodality in Writing explores the kinds of methodological approaches that can augment social semiotic approaches to analyzing and teaching writing, including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, ethnographic approaches, and genre pedagogy. Much of the research shows how the regularities of modes and interest of sign makers are socially shaped to realize convention. Because of this, the approaches are strongly underpinned by social and cultural theories of representation and communication.

Semiotic objections to commodification hold that buying and selling certain goods and services is wrong because of what market exchange communicates or because it violates the meaning of certain goods, services, and relationships. We argue that such objections fail. The meaning of markets and of money is a contingent, socially constructed fact. Cultures often impute meaning to markets in harmful, socially destructive, or costly ways. Rather than semiotic objections giving us reason to judge certain markets as immoral, the usefulness of certain markets gives us reason to judge certain semiotic codes as immoral.

Purpose Drawing from multiple historical sources, this study aims to analyze the social, political and ideological values of Beijing Opera Costumes (henceforth Jingju costumes), a special stage costume, in pre-1949 China. Design/methodology/approach The Critical Historical Research Method (CHRM) and visual social semiotic analysis yielded a critical analysis of Jingju costumes’ profound historicity (that is, their sociohistorically embedded styles, multiple marketing functions, connotations and consumptions). Findings Relying on CHRM and visual social semiotic analysis, this study examines the multifaceted sociopolitical connotations and multilateral marketing functions of Jingju costumes in pre-1949 China. Research limitations/implications This study extends the discussion around stage costumes, informs cultural or entertainment marketing research and deepens a theoretical understanding of the relationship between consuming objects and consumers, and the embedding context that hosts such a relationship. Practical implications This study helps to broaden the understanding of fashion and stage costume industries. Social implications It helps to understand how stage costumes can be used to express political, social and culture values. Originality/value To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first comprehensive analysis of the sociopolitical multiplicity of Jingju costumes, an innovative cultural product marketed and consumed in pre-1949 China. In addition to elaborating on the theatrical and artistic functions of Jingju costumes, this study examines how specific designs and styles of Jingju costumes helped to market the Jingju (Beijing Opera), multiple political values and Chineseness in pre-1949 China.

The author contributes new insights into everyday literacies in participatory cultures using a multimodal analysis of three LGBTQ+ reaction videos on YouTube. LGBTQ+ reaction videos respond, often comedically, to oppressive media forms and technologies. In the analysis, the author considers how reaction video makers draw on seven meaning-making modes and multimodal techniques in digital composition to enact practices of critical media literacy, namely, to identify, interrogate, and disrupt dominant ideologies that undergird media forms and technologies. Through analytic video logging and multimodal analysis of video episodes, the author also examines the role of humor in enactments of these practices. The article forwards the conceptual framework of humor as political possibility made manifest in the range of ways that video makers construct slips of humor, compose multimodal parodies, and create satires that critique dominant ideologies and imagine new ways of being in the world. Examining literate activities in participatory cultures with a focus on LGBTQ+ identities has purchase to explicate possibilities to name, challenge, and transform dominant ideologies toward more just futures.