- Ancient Images and New Technologies:The Semiotics of the Web
The article develops an analysis of visual knowledge and the use of pictures in electronic communication. The author focuses in particular on indexical images, which we use in navigating multimedia documents and the Web. For this purpose, the author bases his study on the one hand on semiotics, the core concepts of which were introduced by C.S. Peirce at the beginning of the last century; and on the other hand on a more classical historical analysis, in order to point out the deep roots of the concepts used in contemporary computer-based communication.
In this article, I develop an analysis of computer-based communication on the World Wide Web, where images, texts and hypertext links interconnect and mutually refer to each other. Our learned ignorance is conceiving an infinite virtual world whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
The use of images to represent knowledge and synthesize information has a long background in the Western history of ideas, particularly in the ancient tradition of the Art of Memory, a strand of classical studies going back to Cicero and persisting up to the baroque era [1]. This discipline was concerned with mnemonics, specifically the ability to memorize anything at will, at a time when paper and other writing tools were rare. There is thus a long history of organizing and interpreting complex images in the scholarly tradition of the Western world; images have been supposed to speak more directly than words to the soul. Within this tradition, one could further investigate the use of particular indexical images, that is, images that may point or refer to other images or texts; such hyperlinks are currently a key feature of multimedia and Web-based documents. Surprisingly (or not) such images can be found as far back in time as the fifteenth century and have been widely used from the seventeenth century onwards. Artists and printers did not wait for computers to exist before putting such devices to work.
However, to fully develop this analysis of indexical images requires more conceptual notions in addition to pure historical research. In order to better understand the conceptual mechanisms behind hyperlinks, I thus borrow from semiotics, in particular the classical trichotomy of Charles Sanders Peirce [2], who distinguished three kinds of signs (symbols, icons and indexes) and their respective functions. But before using semiotics to analyze Web-based hypertext navigation, we will need to retrace the history of the "universal language of computers," that is, binary notation, and relate it to that of the "universal language of images"—a long tradition in the history of ideas going back to Cicero's Art of Memory and various Renaissance "curiosities."
The Universal Language Of Machines
The success of the computer as a universal information-processing machine lies essentially in the fact that it employs a universal language in which many different kinds of information can be encoded and that this language can be mechanized. This makes concrete the well-known dream of Leibniz of a universal language that would be both a lingua characteristica, allowing the "perfect" description of knowledge by exhibiting the "real characters" of concepts and things, and a calculus ratiocinator, making it possible for the mechanization of reasoning. If such a language were employed, Leibniz wrote, errors in reasoning would be avoided, and otherwise endless philosophical discussions would cease with all philosophers sitting around a table saying "calculemus" ("let's calculate"). This would indeed reify Thomas Hobbes' motto "cogitatio est computatio" ("thinking is computing").
Surprisingly enough—or maybe not—Leibniz is also commonly credited with the invention of the universal language of computers: binary notation. It seems, however, that binary notation was originally used circa 1600 by Thomas Harriot [3], the English astronomer famous for discussing the "strange spotednesse of the moon" and being unable to associate it with the mountains and seas of the satellite [4]. Leibniz himself found a predecessor in Abdallah Beidhawy, an Arab scholar of the thirteenth century. A few other authors also proposed some form of binary notation during the seventeenth century, but it was only its "discovery" and publication by Leibniz in 1703 [5] that...