Abstract
This article traces the presence of the concept digital semiotics in scientific literature with the aim of constituting a corpus of study that would allow to identify its goals and fields of interest. We undertook a systematic review of the term in the most important academic databases. We obtained 389 records and analyzed each of them in terms of publication date, type, content, and synthesis of contributions that develop distinct lines of investigation in digital semiotics. The results show a reduced number of first level publications that approach in detail this object of inquiry while establishing multimodal semiotics and social semiotics as the most consolidated branches. However, we found an increasing amount of gray literature that paves the way towards a deeper semiotic research tradition in the 21st century. We conclude by calling for a revision of semiotics, understood as a field of study that brings together interdisciplinary relationships and methodological solutions that interrogate the digital culture.
About the authors
Inmaculada Berlanga-Fernández received her PhD in Philology and PhD in Social Science (Audiovisual Communication) from University of Granada and is currently Full Professor at Universidad Internacional de La Rioja. Her research interests include rhetorics, semiotcs, persuasive communication. She has published numerous papers on these topics in peer-reviewed journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings. She is coordinator of «Procomm» Investigation Group.
Everardo Reyes received his PhD from University of Paris 8, where he is currently Full Professor and co-director of the Masters in Digital Humanities. He is also a member of Labortoire Paragraphe as well as treasurer and member of the Bureau of the International Association for Visual Semiotics. His research interests include information design, media art, hypermedia, and digital culture.
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