OH, SEMIOTICS, SEMIOTICS, SEMIOTICS

Excerpt from
(Extracto de...)

THE SEMIOTICS OF THE WEB*
Philippe Codognet

Avant d'´être séduite par Zeus sous la forme d'’un serpent, et de concevoir par lui Dionysos, Perséphone, laissée par Déméter dans la grotte de Cyane, avait commencé un tissage sur lequel serait représenté l'’univers entier.

Indeed, this ability to manipulate pictorial information proved to be the main reason for the current explosion of cyberspace and the internet. Without images, with human-to-computer and human-to-human (through computer) interactions limited to the alphanumeric set, electronic communication was circumscribed to computer professionals and a few crucial business/military applications. Do not forget that the ancestor of the Internet was the military-funded Arpanet... The widening of the network to mainstream society, with the exponential growth and mediatization of the World Wide Web, could only emerge if electronically exchanged signs could be at the same time both more complex, to hold more information more concisely, and less dry, in order to be more pleasing aesthetically. Let us now rewind history a little and look back to the tradition of using pictorial knowledge in science and philosophy.

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The use of images to represent knowledge and synthetize information has a long background in the Western history of ideas, particularly in the antique tradition of the Art of Memory, a strand of classical studies going back to Cicero and persisting until the late Renaissance. This discipline was concerned with mnemonics and the ability to memorize anything at will, at a time when paper and other writting-supports were rare and rhetoric a key discipline. Leibniz himself, definitively the filium Ariadne of our study, considered that scholarship or " perfect knowledge of the principle of all sciences and the art of applying them " could be divided into three equally important parts : the art of reasoning (logic), the art of inventing (combinatorics) and the art of memory (mnemonics). He even wrote an unpublished manuscript on the ars memoriae. The main idea of the ars memorativa is to organize one’s memory in ‘’places’’ organized into an imaginary architecture, e. g. the rooms of a house.

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http://pauillac.inria.fr/~codognet/web.html





The main idea of the ars memorativa is to organize one’s memory in ‘’places’’ organized into an imaginary architecture, e. g. the rooms of a house. This basic architecture must be well-known and familiar, in order to let oneself wander easily within it. Then, to remember particular sequences of things, one will populate these rooms with ‘’images’’ that should refer directly or indirectly to what has to be remembered.