OK, every thought goes into the blog:
Yesterday I took a repeated look at Kress and van Leeuwen's Multimodal Discourse.
If I sometime were to write a semiotic theory of multimedia, i would adopt their ideas of two kinds of connotation: provenance and experiential meanting potential. I think, however that they are simply indexical and iconic connotations respectively, but I really would love to dip back into Peirce to think about these issues. But while I think their production-line approach is interesting, I can't really see why provenance and experiential meaning potential belong to the production phase only. Of course, they may rely on accidential production artefacts before they are codified, but as soon as they are available for semiosis, they truly can be designed, can't they?
I also am a bit uneasy about the mode/medium distinction. They are onto something, but I think the concept of mode seems a bit undeveloped yet. Like with color. Is it a mode? It depends, Kress and van Leeuwen say. Can't we just say (with Eco) that they are a material, a continuum, out of which signifiers are shaped, and assigned meaning according to a code?
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Kairos and Hypertext '05