A year of bitesize semiotics

So. This little blog turns one year today¹, hooray! Time to take a look back.

A part of the original motivation for this blog came from a spark in around 2019 from watching Petteri Laihonen talk about dog signs. We were partaking in the same university pedagogics course, and as a part of the course I observed his teaching for a few hours. I forget the exact topic of his lecture, but he did spend a lot of time discussing some of his work on the semiotics of dog signs. All of it was completely new to me and I walked away curious on what the world looks to someone who can gleam meaning from symbols and signs like that. I spent a few days trying to stare various street signs really hard, but any sort of epiphany alluded me.

It was a few years later when I reached out to Petteri to discuss the types of dog signs that GenAI systems can generate that I really got going. Largely due to getting a few book recommendations and actually studying the literature of linguistic landscapes a bit. I decided to start recording and then analyzing any signs while at the same time reading up on semiotics in general. And at some point I thought that it might be good to have a little side-blog instead of flooding my main blog with semiotical tidbits.²

And so now after a year I've posted about the analysis of 77 individual signs, done a few longer analyses, and a several dozen posts await in various stages of drafts. Totaling to over a hundred signs I've really thought about for more than 5 minutes, sometimes a lot more. I've also made connections to people with whom I discuss about semiotics on a semiregular basis. With all that I think I'm getting towards having the kind of view I imagined Petteri having. A very narrow view compared to actual researchers of e.g. (visual) semiotics or linguistic landscapes, but a view nonetheless. It really feels like a new sense opening up.

So what have I learned?

1. Context. So much about everything is about context when you think about signs, language, etc. This is probably not surprising to any humanist, but absolutely shocking for someone with a background in the natural sciences and math. In the "hard sciences" you spend a lot of effort to remove the subjective effect from your experiments, and the core idea in mathematical writing is to remove all interpretability.³ The

2. Studying how humans make meaning, or do anything social, is really hard. Facing these kinds of events where you can't make repeated objective measurements makes me feel a bit lost, but I love the idea that instead of giving up I can lean on the humanist tradition.

3. The way humanists use books, writing and knowledge is both strange and really cool. Since the concept of "truth" is very vague and many things seem to be about different points of view or framings, the value of older work is very different than what I've used to. In math or many of the hard sciences old topics can be enlightening and historically interesting, but you don't have to understand how e.g. ether theory worked. But with the humanities it feels like even old and "disproven" theories are still often to understand, as they provide context and information on how a given topic was approached in another setting. Here Ossi Naukkarinen's book "Mihin humanisteja tarvitaan?" (What are humanists needed for?) was really eye-opening for me.

I feel like I am probably underreporting quite hard on what all I have learned here so far. But as with a lot of learning for me, once I grasp something it quite soon turns trivial in my head. It would have been nice if I had written down what I don't understand before I started, but sadly back then it was all unknown unknowns. I of course could do an analysis by comparing my older posts here to newer ones, but I don't think it's actually worth the effort. The world of linguistic landscapes has opened up to me in many new ways, and I don't feel the need to quantify the increase to enjoy it.