Researching visual semiotics online

Abstract

Analyzing visual meaning online and curating digitized images are topics of increasing relevance, but many potential methodologies for doing so remain merely implicit, underthematized, or unexplored. The potential for testing and developing semiotic theory through the exploration of visual data online also requires far more careful attention. In response, this paper provides an integrated, reflexive, Peircean account of two case studies featuring research projects focused on visual data drawn primarily from sources online, relying heavily on Google Image Search as a data collection tool. The first study illustrates the comparative analysis of brand mark logos to test and refine a theory of embodied semiotics involving oppositional relations. The second study illustrates the comparative analysis of images depicting the Tibetan Wheel of Life and Yama the monster of death, in order to test the embodied grounding hypothesis for the semiotic square. Issues of hypothesis formation, research parameters, data collection, database construction, operationalization, coding parameters, open data archiving and related issues are addressed in order to further develop and encourage practices of researching visual semiotics online in the context of Digital Humanities scholarship.Keywords: Mixed-methods research. Google Image search. Visual content analysis. Semiotic theory. Semiotic methods. Peircean semiotics.