About
Alon Friedman and Martin Thellefsen have worked together since 2007 on one question: how signs come to mean something, and what happens to meaning when machines produce the signs.
Their collaboration began with catalog records: how a record shapes what a reader takes to be known. Over nearly two decades the same question has moved through visual communication, data visualization and domain analysis, and now to artificial intelligence, always read through Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs.
Alon brings Peirce to data visualization and to computational tools for sign analysis. Martin brings Peirce to knowledge organization and domain analysis. Together they call this work digital semiotics: the study of how signs are produced, circulated, interpreted and authorized when computational systems, including AI, mediate the process.
Timeline
- 2007
Partnership begins with a study of how catalog records shape meaning.
- 2017
Peirce’s sign theory released as an open-source R package.
- 2022
Work on visual semiotics: data visualization, icons and metaphor.
- 2025
The turn to AI: domain analysis, text generation and the Peircean theory of AI.
- 2026
The ultimate forgery in JASIST. The book on digital semiotics under way.
People
Dr. Alon Friedman
Associate Professor, School of Information, University of South Florida, Tampa
Peircean semiotics in data visualization, computational tools for sign analysis, and generative AI. His recent study in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, “Reading without understanding: Peirce’s semiotics as a diagnostic for AI in the humanities,” tested how four AI systems read Peirce’s own writing.
Dr. Martin Thellefsen
Associate Professor, Department of Communication (KOMM), University of Copenhagen
Peircean semiotics in knowledge organization, domain analysis, and the meaning of machine-generated text. His latest joint publication is “The ultimate forgery: a semiotic deconstruction of large language models as engines of simulated selfhood” in JASIST.
Network
Co-authors and contributors whose notes or framework extensions appear on the site.
Contribute
The framework is open to extension and critique. Three ways in, each reviewed by both editors.
Respond to a note
Extend or dispute an argument published here. Responses appear under the note they answer.
500 to 1,500 words
Propose a guest note
One argument about meaning in computational culture, grounded in Peircean or related semiotics.
800 to 1,500 words, APA references
Apply the framework
A case reading of a generated text, image or record, following the four steps on the Framework page.
Case readings, any length