The Semiotics of Design in Media Visualization: Mereology and Observation Strategies

The purpose of this paper is to discern in what ways the semiotic methods of the Post- Greimasian French structuralist and the American Peircian traditions can enrich the study of contemporary methods of computational analysis of culture, particularly in the field of Cultural Analytics as implemented by the Russian Art Historian and Computer Scientist Lev Manovich. These semiotic approaches will be helpful in understanding what kinds of visualizations are being generated for use in Cultural Analytics, and what kinds of operations the observer must perform in order to experiment with scientific visualizations of this information.