Representing meaning
Follow the changing ways humans have represented meaning, from gesture and spoken language to writing systems, binary code and digital media. This pathway follows the main changes in chronological order and shows which older practices continued beside them.
How did meaning become visible, audible, countable and programmable?
Five turning points
Embodied non-verbal communication
Gaze direction, head orientation and pointing indicate what matters now. Joint attention allows two people to know that they are attending to the same object or event, an important basis for teaching, reference and coordinated action.
Open topic →Song, music and chant
Changes the wider history’s understanding of information. Earlier topics might tempt the project to define information mainly as content moving between minds.
Open topic →Pictograms and ideograms
A full scene may require many figures and contextual details. A conventional sign can reduce that scene to one compact mark.
Open topic →Numerical notation
Compact signs replace large collections of objects or marks. Positional notation can represent vast ranges with a small digit set.
Open topic →Binary digital representation
Long sequences of two symbols can encode numbers, characters, instructions, images and sound. Generality comes from compositional length and shared interpretation.
Open topic →Follow the history from beginning to present
Embodied non-verbal communication
Embodied non-verbal communication is the use of visible, tactile and spatial behaviour to influence what another organism notices, feels, infers or does.
Vocalisation, prosody and spoken language
Vocalisation, prosody and spoken language covers the human vocal-auditory system through which breath, voice, articulated sound, rhythm, pitch, timing and shared linguistic conventions are used to communicate meaning.
Song, music and chant
Song, music and chant examines song, music and chant as patterned sound systems that reorganise human communication.
Rock and cave art
Rock and cave art marks one of the earliest surviving transitions from performed communication to durable visual communication.
Pictograms and ideograms
Pictograms and ideograms examines the moment when visual communication becomes repeatable, conventional and compressible.
Tally marks and notches
Tally marks and notches examines one of the smallest-looking inventions in ITEM: the deliberate production of repeated marks, cuts or notches to retain quantity, recurrence, sequence or obligation outside unaided.
Numerical notation
Numerical notation is a conventional system for representing exact or structured quantities through visible, tactile or otherwise persistent signs.
Writing systems
A writing system is a conventional graphic system that represents units of language with enough stability that a reader can recover linguistic content without the original speaker being present.
Binary digital representation
Binary digital representation reduces information to patterns over two distinguishable symbols or states.