Semiotics is the systematic study of sign processes and meaning-making. It is the investigation into how meaning is created and communicated. Semiotics can include signs, logos, gestures, and other linguistic and non-linguistic communication methods. The field of semiotics focuses on understanding how people create and interpret the meaning of signs and symbols, including how people visually communicate through metaphor, analogy, allegory, metonymy, symbolism, and other means of expression. Semiotics is a part of the broader study of communication, including visual arts, graphic design, and basic visual literacy.
Semiotics started out as an academic investigation of the meaning of words (linguistics), then moved into examining peoples behavior (anthropology and psychology), then evolved to become an inquiry into culture and society (sociology and philosophy), following that it moved onto assisting with analyses of cultural products (films, literature, art - critical theory), and finally and more recently became a methodology for researching and engineering the process of semiosis, in the study of and design for human-computer interaction or to mimic aspects of human cognition through artificial intelligence and knowledge representation.
