Editorial: Resurgence.
by Paul Bouissac

The Internet and its ever expanding web magnificently serve the construction of global communities of researchers. The new culture enables instant information gathering, free transfer of knowledge, and much needed critical feedback on the spot. But this does not make local networks and interactions irrelevant. Quite on the contrary, embodied communication remains the cornerstone of the edification of science and scholarship. Local communities foster face-to-face, informal exchanges of ideas and references across the divide of disciplines in a way that electronic distance interactions cannot achieve. Small groups based on intellectual affinities and personal sympathies emerge to form micro-cultures of their own and sometimes expand to involve a range of pluridisciplinary resources. Semiotics has proved to be a particularly successful catalyst for the formation of such local networks motivated by a genuine desire to interact and learn rather than being driven by departmental power politics and their conflicts of influence. There has been, and there still are several groups of this sort in the world, each with its particular history and profile which SemiotiX endeavors to map for the benefit of the international, global community of semioticians of all persuasions.

The Toronto Semiotic Circle is such a group. It began informally in the early 1970s. Occasional discussions among colleagues from various departments at the University of Toronto who had an interest in semiotics were progressively transformed into regular monthly meetings. All the initial participants held different views of semiotics as they were coming from a great variety of intellectual traditions and academic disciplines. But they all shared nevertheless an interest in the theoretical views and intellectual histories of the others. From this ground, a vibrant local association emerged and developed numerous activities during the last three decades of the previous century. But these were the times of print, postage stamps, and pre-cellular telephones. With the advent of the new media culture, the traditional Circle’s activities moved to new forms of expression through the Open Semiotic Resource Center, and is now at the forefront of semiotic research and education online.

In the meantime, a new generation of scholars – those who were students during the early days of the Circle – felt the need to reinvent a local forum through which members of disciplines that are not prone to interact with each other could share problems and ideas. Moreover, there was a basic agreement that semiotics still provides the best available framework for such interactions between the social and the natural sciences. The Toronto Semiotic Circle, which has a tradition of bringing together researchers from a wide array of disciplines, resumed its meetings in 2005, and organized a series of symposia on “Gestures, Conversations and Dialogues” during the 2005-06 academic year. Visitors from abroad, such as Richard Lanigan (Communicology, SIU), Charles Goodwin (Applied Linguistics, UCLA) and Deb Roy (Robotics, MIT) joined local faculties for workshops and seminars that proved the template of the Circle to be a perfect venue for these proceedings. At the last meeting of the year, Dr. Anne Urbancic (formerly from the semiotic program at Victoria College) and Dr. Jack Sidnell (Anthropology) were elected respectively President and Chief Executive Officer for 2007. Professor Emeritus John McClelland and Professor Marcel Danesi were elected Honorary Presidents.

The resurgence of this local institution bears witness to the resilience of semiotics and the continuing perception of its necessity. The fundamental principles that had guided the creation of the Toronto Semiotic Circle are much alive today. Disciplines foster isolated intellectual cultures, some with a long history of brilliant achievements, in which, unfortunately, a form of tribal mentality too often prevails. For the most part, they are mutually impenetrable besides some superficial zones of contact in the form of joint academic programs or the occasional hyphenation of two domains of inquiry. This state of affairs is both lamented as an impediment to progress (given that there is not a single real life problem that can be solved by the resources of a single discipline), and reinforced by the standards of professionalism that constrain individuals to remain at the core rather than at the periphery of their discipline if they want to achieve a successful career. But this is often at the cost of real creativity.

Disciplines interface productively through individual contacts across the fences that sustain their fragile epistemological identities. Friendships and mutual esteem can build trans-disciplinary bridges on the individual level but flexible institutions like the Toronto Semiotic Circle greatly facilitate the circulation of specialized knowledge and the emergence of local networks that ensure constant interactions in the embodied mode. The vocation of semiotics and its deep epistemological significance may indeed be the creation of a culture of the third kind that would transcend the fragmentation of knowledge which is an unfortunate, probably necessary side-effect of ever increasing specializations. Of course, semiotics is not a panacea but if it inspires the creation of local institutions that help achieve even a modest degree of cross-disciplinary interactions, it can definitely be considered an invaluable resource.

The presence of semiotics on the Internet is impressive and this allows countless opportunities for people to connect with sources of knowledge and with other people. But the search engines like GOOGLE, as they stand now, have their own limitations. Keywords can lead to an infinite list of sites, sometimes hundreds of thousands among which the ones relevant to the question that prompted the search can be lost in a sea of noise. Of course, the search can be narrowed by adding specifications, but only to a degree. Scrolling down can be rewarding but also time consuming as well as distracting. Serendipity does not always bless the researcher. Some engines, like KARTOO, offer two-dimensional mappings of the domains relevant to a keyword. However, as Nature (27 April 2006) reports, the inventor of the World Wide Web and the institutions and companies this invention has generated are aware of these shortcoming and are actively involved in moving to the next stage: Search engines that will hunt for meanings and patterns rather than simply for words and phrases. Software are being developed that explore open “textbases” , notably in biology (e.g., Biotext Barkley or Arrowsmith Linking). This allows the scanning of many publications “in order to discover relationships based on phrases or sentences that, when analysed in combination, cumulatively link one object (such as a disease) to another (such as a molecule). Another endeavor toward this goal is the Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI) which can be examined at nature.com. Another system worth checking is browse4research.

In the meantime, it should not be forgotten that every scholar is an embodied database which can be searched providing that the right relationship is established. The great advantage of this kind of search is that it is driven by meanings and patterns rather than words and phrases. Within a given discipline, however, there may be at times and in certain circumstances a tendency to protect rather than share information. Intra- disciplinary competition can indeed be ferocious. But, in multi-disciplinary groups, such as the ones of which the Toronto Semiotic Circle is a paradigmatic example, the sharing of information is much less constrained, mainly because everybody equally benefits from information exchanged over a long period of time within a flexible institutional context. The sustainability of semiotics depends on the proliferation of such groups based on disciplinary diversity and embedded within universities which afford an environment rich in intellectual resources, rather than on forming global clusters or cliques characterized by ideological homogeneity.

Anne Urbancic's academic interests include Semiotics, 19th/early 20th century Italian Literature, and second language acquisition pedagogy. An award winning senior lecturer at the University of Toronto with numerous publications, she is currently the co-ordinator of VIC ONE First Year Program (Frye and Pearson Streams). Previously, she taught courses on Poststructuralism and Postmodernism in the Program in Semiotics and Communication Theory at the University of Toronto. She is currently completing a project that will allow scholars electronic access to the unpublished letters of Tuscan author Mario Pratesi.

Jack Sidnell, Associate Professor of Anthropology, was elected chief executive officer of the Toronto Semiotic Circle