| Course title | Experimental semiotics |
|---|---|
| Course code | KOL/ESEM |
| Organizational form of instruction | Lecture + Seminary |
| Level of course | Bachelor |
| Year of study | not specified |
| Semester | Winter and summer |
| Number of ECTS credits | 4 |
| Language of instruction | Czech, English |
| Status of course | Compulsory-optional |
| Form of instruction | Face-to-face |
| Work placements | This is not an internship |
| Recommended optional programme components | None |
| Lecturer(s) |
|---|
|
| Course content |
|
1. introduction: course schedule, the ISI, the paradigm shift to life online 2. symbol grounding problem 3. emergence of meaning 4. intelligence and agency: biological vs artificial intelligence 5. chat GPT experiment 1 6. chat GPT experiment 2 7. chat GPT experiment 3 8. cybernetics and cybersemiotics 9. technosemiotics 10. critical digital humanities 11. presentation of student works
|
| Learning activities and teaching methods |
| unspecified |
| Learning outcomes |
|
*the course takes place partially online. inquire within for more details (tyler.bennett1984@gmail.com) Critical digital humanities interrogates 'fluid identity construction online'. Are there no domains of human life we would prefer not to upload to the digital? May the screen projection approximate or even surpass the 'real thing' in every case? Or maybe there are some parts of our lives we would rather not be automated? These are only the first questions to drive the relatively recent explosion of critical digital humanities. 'More information' does not equal 'more meaning'. This is obvious to us today, even if it remains analytically indefensible or nonsensical, nor is the problem an entirely new concern. The crisis of information and communication technologies may be just the latest symptom of the invention of writing itself four or five thousand years ago; but the real ramifications of that originary rupture are still not fully understood, and whatever they are, they seem to be accelerated by the digital. The scromble-effect of symbolic clutter in the browser, the feedback loop of speculative finance on global resource extraction, the ideological echo chambers of the personal newsfeed, all are 'representational' problems pre-existing the digital. People's worst tendencies are comically magnified in the online domain, like the charicatures reflected in the fun-house mirror. Umberto Eco (the most famous and important semiotician) explained back in the 1980s how even a normal mirror appears to make the left-hand the right and the right-hand the left, but this is already mistake. The mirror in fact reflects everything exactly where it should be, point-by-point. It is only when we confuse the reflection for the mirror-gazing subject themselves, that we ask misguided questions about whether the hand on the left side of the image is that image's 'right hand' or not. That is, the perception of reversal is the quintessential illusion. For Eco, this was related to why a mirror is not a sign, but we may now think of the digital projection on the computer screen also as a kind of very sophisticated mirror. The observation is meant to draw attention to the limits of the digital projection as a tool for 'knowledge aquisition', for even more so than the traditional mirror, what may seem like knowledge aquisition is oftentimes just self-gazing, the listless 'browsing' of a pre-determined and the self-gratifying set of signifiers. The reproducibility of information online adds to the high fidelity experience of the digital projection, but Eco's arugment is that we are always interacting primarily with an imaginary projection sustained by the personal repertoire or memories. Some of these metaphors about mirrors and the online experience are also well serviced by the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, who considers the act of imagining one's self-image as seen by the other (captured so well by the Zoom self-view camera) to be the primary onanistic fantasy. All the assignments for our class will be related to online profile building and design, offering many multi-media options, instead of just writing assignments. Cybernetics, second-generation semiology, cognitive and biosemiotics provide a powerful vocabulary for our new investigation to critical digital humanities.
|
| Prerequisites |
|
unspecified
|
| Assessment methods and criteria |
|
unspecified
The Moodle has all the weekly assignments and readings, with a detailed schedule of our course. There you will find a number of interactive options and instructions. The basis of student work will be online profile management. The student will select one social media profile or website as the platform of their output. They will outline at the beginning of the semester what they want to achieve in the improvement of their profile. Contents may be text, grapic design, or video. They should also reflect an interest in at least one concept from our readings for this course. On that note, students will be expected to do the assigned reading each week and to post answers about the text on the Moodle forum. |
| Recommended literature |
|
|
| Study plans that include the course |
| Faculty | Study plan (Version) | Category of Branch/Specialization | Recommended semester | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): General Linguistics and Communication Theory (2021) | Category: Philological sciences | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: - |
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): General Linguistics and Communication Theory (2019) | Category: Philological sciences | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: - |
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): General Lingvistics (2021) | Category: Philological sciences | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: - |
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): General Lingvistics (2022) | Category: Philological sciences | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: - |
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): General Linguistics and Communication Theory (2021) | Category: Philological sciences | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: - |
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): General Linguistics and Communication Theory (2019) | Category: Philological sciences | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: - |
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): General Lingvistics (2019) | Category: Philological sciences | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: - |