Analyzing Signs

Here’s how to judge the quality of your work. Remember that no image or group of images will provide an opportunity to use all the semiotic concepts and terms. Rather than rating yourself slavishly by how many terms you use, emphasize the big picture. What overall sense do you make of the image(s)?

Initial Reaction

Do the images grab your attention? Are they striking, interesting, arresting as examples? Do they give you an immediate cause for thought?

Sign Analysis

Signs. What signs do you identify? Did you start with a complete, exhaustive list of them? Check your work. Each sign must be listed with its meaning (connotation, not denotation). Is each sign described in a complete sentence?

Attributes. In some cases, you may want to list some of the specific ways a sign works. Did you do so only in places where the meaning would otherwise be unclear? (Avoid gratuitous use of semiotic terms.)

Codes

Signs come in codes, or sets closely tied together by meaning. Did you group the signs from your list into a few clearly-related sets?

Does each set share a common meaning (that is larger than any single sign)? Did you assert it clearly? Even if it seems to repeat the meanings you used to describe each sign, be sure you stated the meaning of the set.

Myths

What larger, assumed meaning do the various codes work from? Your conclusions about these myths become the major assertions and thesis of your analysis.

Meanings

The above process usually yields only a surface reading of the media example. Once you completed the process once, did you go back and look for deeper meanings?

The most common is reading the image as if it showed something real, as if the media simply mimicked the real world of lived experience. As you build your knowledge and skill, you will learn different strategies for looking through the surface of the image to find other meanings:

Constructedness. Ways the image is invented, made-up, created to project particular meanings.

General discourses. national identity, other cultures, race and stereotyping, gender and sexuality, audience positioning

Values. economics, aesthetics, religious & political ideals

Did your analysis lead you into these larger issues? The signs, codes, myths need to build slowly so that you come to these issues from inside the image. Does every statement you make refer to and spring from your observations of the example you selected? Avoid starting from the global and moving into the image – most people never get to the image when they take this approach.

Overall

The reason for doing analyses of form is to learn something! The opportunities to learn depend partly on the quality of the example you chose, but some that seem at first uninteresting turn out to have a lot going on. Judge how much the analysis showed you – helped you see – through the previous steps.