global geosemiotics project

Geosemiotics is the study of discourses in place, investigating those discourses that are embedded in the material world. Geosemiotics primarily examines signs and their placement, but also examines buildings and other material structures that display discourses.

In the broadest sense, Geosemiotics (1) analyses discourses embedded in the material world, and (2) views all discourses as material and situated.

The global geosemiotics project is a web-tool that is being offered by the multimodal research centre, allowing the collection and sharing of image-files of discourses in place.

Researchers interested in geosemiotics can send a message to the multimodal research centre requesting access to the web-tool to view the many images of signs and material objects collected thus far and to add their own image-files to the data base.

Suzie's interest in the Geosemiotics project

I am particularly interested in how we can read identity off of signs and material structures in the world. I believe it is particularly in the material world where we can begin to grasp the often ephemeral sides of identity and power. Here, we find identity being mediated -- and thus offered and ascribed -- by external mediational means; and it is within these external cultural tools that we can trace the internal mediational means such as schemata and ideologies which again afford and constrain identities.

Sky's interest in geosemiotics

I am interested in how material objects have a cognitive dimension, which invites us not only to see and touch them, but also to 'know' them. The sign composition of an object allows us to know it in a particular way, and to form an emotive response towards it. I am interested in exploring how an environment, or 'place', is formed through the interactions between an object's semiotic composition and a perceiver's cognitive-emotive reactions

Pirkko's interest in the Geosemiotics project

My interest in discourses in place originates from my attempts at understanding how people in their everyday actions make sense of their surroundings as part of their ongoing action and how they convey those understandings to each other. Geosemiotics makes it possible to empirically study how/whether so-called global discourses have an impact locally.

Najma's fascination with Geosemiotcs

Geosemiotics captures the intercultural meaning of images. It enriches the world of multimodal analysis and illuminates the power that lies in images.  This is the essence of my fascination with geosemiotics.