information, communication and

meaning
 Introduction to
0415146726 Fiske Routledge 1990
Communication Studies

0415265940 Chandler Semiotics – The Basics Routledge 2002

Harvard
Seely
The Social Life of Business
1578517081 Brown 2000
Information School
& Duguid
Press

0749397055 Eco The Name of the Rose Vintage 1992

0140282688 Toole The Confederacy of Dunces Penguin 1981

The Curious Incident of the

0099450259 Haddon Vintage 2002
Dog in the Night-time

Faber &
0571216420 Pierre Vernon God Little 2003
Faber

0552771155 Ali Brick Lane Black Lane 2004

 How do we interpret?
 How do we know the interpretation is
correct?
What does this sign mean?
What does this sign mean?
What does this sign mean?
What does this sign mean?
What do these signs mean?

2 3
 come up with your own definition…
Information is knowledge communicated concerning some particular
fact, subject, or event
Oxford English Dictionary

1. The Communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence

2. Knowledge obtained from investigation, study or instruction
Webster’s

Information is data with meaning

Information is only a measure of the difficulty in transmitting the

sequences (i.e. messages) produced from some information
source
Shannon and Weaver

The distillation of data through its being processed results in the

creation of information
Clifton
 information cannot exist independently of
the receiving person
 reaction to information is some kind of
analysis or at least interpretation
 differences between data and information
must be preserved
Information is…
 Static : processed and interpreted by reciever.
Reciever does all the action and information
itself is static.
 Social : there are people involved.some are
sending and some receiving and interpreting
data to become information.
 Contextual : information only applies in the
context in which it is sent.
 Interpreted: it is interpreted and people
understand it. Culture,history and knowledge
used in interpretation.
 Limited by scope:a newspaper headline lasts
for only a day.
“I know you believe you
understand what you think I
said - but I'm not sure you
realise what you heard is not
what I meant!"
“My sources are unreliable, but their
information is fascinating”
Ashleigh Brilliant
 Data only becomes „information‟ when it is
transmitted
 Information becomes „knowledge‟ when it is
interpreted

 but…
 How is it interpreted?
 Is the interpretation correct?
 What is knowledge?
 Is it possible to store knowledge?
 Does Wikipedia allow you to store knowledge?
An important feature of information and
knowledge is:
 Understanding
For there to be understanding there needs
to be
 Meaning
and
 Communication

Which leads us to the next part of this

lecture, examining semiotics
We use the word “Engineering” in the title
of this course. What do we mean by this?

 Constructing something useful

 Breaking a problem down into a number
of parts
 Understanding, modelling, building…
 Applying engineering principles
 Professionalism?
 Theanalysis of signs and symbols and how
they function

A study of meaning and communication

 Anact of communication has been successful
when the intentions of the sender are
understood by the receiver.

Source Message destination

transmitter receiver

noise source Shannon and Weaver

Communication takes place via a number of
signs. These signs have a number of
properties:
 Pragmatics - content
 culture and context in which the
communication takes place
 assumptions, expectations, beliefs
 Semantics - purpose
 the connection between the signs and the
resulting behaviour and actions
 Syntactics – formalisms – the way we formalise these things into a
form of understanding.when we say take every eight 1‟s & 0‟s & transform that into a word hence
understanding achieved.

 Empirics - signals/codes-bits and bytes that pass an electric

wire or the formal codes and signs used in a business conext.
Modern semiotics has come out of a number of different sources
 Ferdinand de Saussure
 a Swiss linguist
 Interested in structure (how does a word fit in the overall structure of
a language or communication)
 Charles Peirce
 an American philosopher
 Interested in process of language or communication

And others….

 Charles Morris
 Claude Levi-Strauss
 Ogden & Richards
 Roman Jakobson
 Umberto Eco
 Signified

Signifier

 The whole circle is sign divided into signified/signifier required for communication to take place.
 Tree (word) ->signifier then you would get a picture (signified) – signified is the actual object.
 Ramdidudal(word)-> signified?
 Sign vehicle: the form of the sign
sense Sense: the sense made of the sign
Referent: what the sign 'stands for'

Sign

sign vehicle referent

a semiotic triangle
 The process of communication was of interest.(3 parts to a
communication process)
• Triangle represents the sign
• Sign vehicle-form of a sign e.g the picture of the man on
the door
• Sense- how we understand it e.g gentleman‟s toilet
• Referent –the thing itself e.g in this case the toilet itself.
• Dotted line is that there is no physical link between the
sign vehicle and the referent without the sense.
• Problem for developers: due to the fact that we are not
fully informed about what is being said to us.- digging out
the hidden meanings is a skill very vital for system
developers.
consideration of the context of activity or what is the human
part or activity in this system.

characteristics of:
 people
 organisations
 and acts of communication which affect information

Pragmatic analysis will look at:

 shared assumptions
 "common knowledge"
 how ambiguities arise and dealt with e.g the use of a word
service in four or five different part.

an understanding of the informal nature of human interaction

 Culture- the set of beliefs and assumptions
associated with a community

 thecontext is composed of the culture and

its most important feature is language.
 Peoplewho share a common culture see the
world in a similar way

 Wheredoes shared thought come from and

how does it exist?

 Norms(behaviour)…
 Perceptual - the way we see the world;
recognising patterns
 Cognitive - standardised beliefs and "common"
knowledge
 Evaluative - agreement about how objectives
can be reached
 Behavioural - predictability of human actions;
including etiquette
 Denotative - choices of signs and what they
signify

 example - electronic mail, blogs, etc.

 Assist in creating the business rules.
 the analysis of the meaning of information
 turning data into information
 moving from the world of signs to the
world of actions
 example -
"How many books are there in the Library?"
Charles Morris' framework for
understanding signs:
v sets up in w the disposition to react in a
certain kind of way, x, to certain kind of
object y (not yet the stimulus), under
certain conditions z.
v - the sign
w - interpreters
x - interpretants
y - significations
z - contexts
a "No Smoking" sign.
 sign - notice on wall
 interpreter - any person in the room
 Interpretant(what is being asked to be done)
- readiness to refrain from smoking
 signification - refraining from
smoking(people stopped from smoking )
 Context(where the sign exists) - the room
(outside of the room the sign does not apply)
Semantic Analysis is the analysis of the semantic
content of a situation
to carry out semantic analysis we need to have:
 a schema - a framework or structure for all the
terms in a universe of discourse
and identify:
 Agents(people doing things within the system),
objects(devices by which communication takes
place) and events(activities that happen that
cause it to work)
 This gives us a picture of the system.
 study of the rules which govern
communication
 vocabulary, grammar and a syntax (also
phonetics for verbal communication)
 logical analysis
 propositional logic
 predicate logic
 Objective and subjective theories
 Understanding the code used
 the study of communication theory and
information theory
 looking at the physical aspects of
communication
 modulation - noise, distortion, accuracy,
speed and redundancy
 Hard systems
 Technology based
 Easy to predict
 Little complexity

 Soft systems
 Human based
 Hard to predict
 Complex
Ontological Approach to Systems Analysis
 the branch of metaphysics dealing with the
nature of being
 (from the Greek ont - being)
 “There is the system”

Epistemological Approach
 the theory of the method or grounds of
knowledge
 (from Greek episteme - knowledge)
 “I can consider any collective set as a system”