Information Semiotics for Digital Humanities: Towards a New Conception of Quantity and Quality in Culture

As symbolic systems put reality into play, so mediation puts symbolic systems into play - this statement captures the premise of information semiotics or alternately, semiotic informatics. Digital humanities calls for an integration of systems thinking into humanist inquiry. Without systems thinking, digital humanists can only utilize, as end users, available digital tools toward the traditional ends of humanist research, such as using software, code editors and prototyping platforms to produce interpretations or criticisms of ever more narrowly defined cultural specificities. Systems theoretic lenses and tools always remain available as a methodological mode and is descriptive of much work that can come under the heading of 'digital humanities' today, which has yet to integrate systems thinking into its general literature. A more technologically reflexive approach-one that takes seriously the conceptual underpinnings of technology and its deeper implications for humanities' digital discourse domains-challenges traditional self-understandings of what it is that humanities 'does' or is supposed to be concerned with.