CMN 1160 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Orson Welles, Semiotics, Intertextuality

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Communication
• Course: CMN 1160
• Professor: Daniel Pare

Document Summary

Representation is the act of putting or encoding sculptures, film, plays, television programs, or any other medium of communication. ideas into words, paintings, Ex: a picture of a plane crash isnt the crash itself, but a representation of that crash. When studying communication, particularly communication content, we study practices and events they describe. Representations are, to a large extent, simplifications and interpretations of the objects. A more rigorous way of thinking about representation is as a process of signification. A sign is anything with meaning: a word, an image, a sound, a painting . The swiss linguist ferdinand the saussure - sometimes considered the founder of semiotics or the science of signs - posited that signs are composed of two elements: the signifier and the signified. Signifier is the thing that we see, hear, or feel: the image on a screen, sounds,