Semiotix - A Global Information Bulletin

There is no free ride for semiosis. Signs have a cost and a carbon footprint. Sign processes, in any form we can observe them, consume energy and produce heat. Expectedly, too much heat causes communication crashes and semiotic meltdowns. Read more...

"Writing and other visual signs pervade our lives so much so that alien anthropologists may suspect we evolved to read. Why are we so good at such an unnatural task? Could it be because our visual signs have culturally evolved to be shaped like nature, just like what our visual systems evolved to process?" Read more...

How do the sciences and the arts reflect on their own practices? That is what the 2009 Biannual Conference of the Swiss Association of Cultural Theory and Semiotics (SGS/ ASS) explored when scholars from Germany, Holland, Finland and Switzerland gathered at the University of Zurich on the 24th and the 25th of April. Read more...

Semiotics at the University of Torino has a glorious past, an industrious present, and a promising future. Read more...

The 10th Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies was held in A Coruña (Spain) from September 22 to 26. Read more...

The 7th Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature took place in Toronto, at Victoria College, on June 9-15, 2009. Read more...

These brief reviews are designed to call attention to some of the most relevant publications by and about Saussure that marked the first decade of the current century. Read more...

For most people, gesture refers to a non-intellectual expression of feeling, a rudimentary kind of communication. The idea of humans pointing and waving parts of their bodies at each other, themselves, or their gods, appears atavistic, a relic of a time before speech; a harking back to the origin of the species, to simian chatter or cavemen grunts, to modes of sociality and sense-making overtaken by the development of language. Read more...

Decisions to create CIM/MIS enterprises should be based on the perspectives in IT and management science, considered not just in a short-term but in mid- and long-terms as well. The milestones that separate these three time scales are determined by particular events rather than physical time frames. Read more...