Day Four: Data Semiotics and Numero-Politics

SDS 189: Data and Social Justice

Lindsay Poirier
Statistical & Data Sciences, Smith College

Fall 2023

What is numero-politics? What examples were described in today’s reading?

Semiotics

  • Study of meaning-making
    • How do certain signs come to represent certain interpretations?
  • Why should we study the processes of meaning-making?

Saussurian Semiotics: Semiosis as a Structure

  • Ferdinand Saussure coined term semiotics in late 1800s
  • Extension of research into linguistics (history of languages)
  • Meaning is relational not referential - emerges from context of other signs
  • Signs are immaterial (composed of sounds and thought)
  • Signs are arbitrary
    • Nothing intrinsic determining relationship between signified and signifier
    • Suggests autonomy of language in the context of “reality”
    • Suggests that relation emerges from society and culture

G signifier signifier signified signified signifier–signified

Peircian Semiotics: Semiosis as a Process

  • Charles Sanders Peirce was a pragmatist philosopher and logician
  • Proposed a triadic model of semiotics
  • Interpretant is a sign inside the mind of the person interpreting
  • Emphasized the context of interpretation in ways that Saussure did not
  • Positioned thinking as dialogic

G object object interpretant interpretant object–interpretant representamen representamen interpretant–representamen representamen–object

Barthes Semiotics: Culture and Semiotics

  • Roland Barthes was a French 20th century theorist
  • Semiotic systems emerge within the context of particular cultures
  • Theorized the emergence of myth in language
  • Differentiated levels of meaning:
    • Level 1: Sign (signifier/signified) (denotative system)
    • Level 2: Second-Order meaning (connotative system)

Derrida: Post-Structuralist Semiotics

  • Jacques Derrida was a 20th century French philosopher
  • Meaning never total or fixed; it is always postponed: différance
  • Rejected structuralism for presupposing a center that regulates the structure of meaning
  • Deconstruction assesses the underlying assumptions that position certain terms as hierarchical to others

Feminist and Post-colonial Semiotics

  • Advanced through theorists Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Gayatri Spivak
  • Acknowledges how language sustain power by centering certain terms as hierarchical to others
  • Language constitutes conceptions of Center/Periphery; Us/Other
  • Structuralism produces sub-alternity: oppressed must adopt language of colonizers to be heard

Data Semiotics

  • Data Definitions
    • …police the boundaries of what counts.
    • … have a history.
    • …center certain meanings while sidelining others.

How is numero-politics connected to data semiotics?

Let’s look at a data dictionary together!