Work and interest is continuing on a number of older projects; look in my current Bibliography for citations to published work in these areas.
Research on hypertext semantics, emphasizing the role of the hypertext medium as artifact, technology, and system of cultural practices in the strategies for creating meaning relationships within and especially between textual and hypermedia object or units in hypertext webs. A first presentation on this work was made at the International Congress of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Cardiff, Wales, U.K. in July 1998. Abstract. Presentation and notes now available in Hypertext TextWeb. More recent presentations were made at the 2001 Congress at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. A first publication of this work will appear in the new journal Visual Communication.
Analysis of visual and textual relationships in multimedia websites; longterm project. A closely related project is the analysis of the semiotics of multimodal texts generally. See Multimedia Semiotics and the "NASA" project.
Future work will look particularly at scientific and technical
communication on websites, usability studies and the website
design process, and other online hypermedia.
Continuing research on semantic resources for constructing
evaluative and orientational stances toward textual content,
interlocutors, and heteroglossic voices. A first study of
resources and strategies of evaluative-orientational textuality
in newspaper editorials is in press in Functions of Language (Editorials paper). A second study
extending this work to visual semiotic resources and their
combination with verbal resources in political cartoons has been
completed in a first stage and presented at ISFC Toronto (Abstract, 1997), University of
Vienna (1997), and University of Ottawa (1998). A written version
is not yet available, but preliminary notes and analysis are
available. (Cartoons Notes).
Continuing work on the general principles of the dynamics and evolution of ecosocial systems (see Textual Politics, chapter 6). New directions include analysis of how semiotic artifacts permit direct interaction between processes on radically different space and time scales (see Aarhus paper, in press), and discussions of the evolution of ecosocial systems from less complexly self-coupled precursor ecosystems (first presentation at WESS conference, 1998. Abstract. Details available in WESS Textweb.) See also under B above. Another aspect of this work deals with the role of multiple time-scales and heterochrony in the analysis of ecosocial systems and complex self-organizing systems generally; details in Time Textweb. See also applications of the model to conceptualizing identity development (MCA paper).
New work aims at assessing the feasibility of using computationally-based multi-level multi-agent modeling software to simulate qualitative features of social-ecological systems, such as school districts and their communities, undergoing processes of change across multiple timescales.
See also Multiple
Timescale Analysis.
This work, which began with my studies of multimedia semiotics in scientific print publications (full HTML version with Figures), was based on noticing the role of mathematics as a bridge between the more categorially based or 'typological' strategies of linguistic meaning-making and the more 'topological' forms of meaning-by-degree in visual representations of quantitative and spatial relationships. I made use of this notion in my analysis of visual and verbal communication in medical diagnostic discourse in a clinical education group (PBL paper).
A fuller exposition has been written for a volume on the contributions of semiotic perspectives to mathematics education (Manuscript). There is also some discussion of this work in the last section of my paper for a conference on science education held in Barcelona. There will be a continuing elaboration of these themes in a textweb built around my WESS presentation.