navigational markers of the page (page numbers, contents page, and index) differ
from those of the screen.
Page and screen look different, they feel different, and they mean different. The
unsettled space between what has been (the page) and what will be (the screen)
provides a communicative potential for reshaping modes and their relations, in
particular, the relations between writing and visual image. This focus on the
relationship between writing and image is addressed through Chapters Four, Five and
Six. Both the page and the screen can be seen as the critical interface or semiotic
resource that mediates between the author∕designer of a programme or book and its
reader.
The Concept of Sign
Within multimodality the concept of sign is multimodal, motivated and
transformative. Multimodality and social semiotics draws attention to the social
agency of people in meaning making. It looks at how people realise meaning through
their selection of semiotic resources (meaning potentials) from a range of modes as
signifiers for what they wish to express in specific social contexts. Hence my
analytical focus in the thesis on computer applications as semiotic texts designed to
make meaning, and the focus on student interaction with these to realise new
meaning.
I understand signs as being produced by the motivated conjunction of forms and
meaning and from this standpoint I theorise the relationship between signifier and
signified as motivated. The concept of the ‘motivated sign’ and ‘interest’ introduced
in the previous chapter serves to shift the focus from the system of signs to the
process of meaning making (signs). In this thesis I therefore analyse the relationship
between signifier and signified as a trace of the characteristics of the producer of the
sign (as a socially located person) and the entity to be represented.
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