I’m coordinator of Semiofest’s series of informal online “sessions.” These events are intended not only to share best practices among, but to nurture collegiality and friendship within the global semio community.

Coming up on September 30 (at 2 pm UK time)…

SEMIOTICS AS EXPERT TESTIMONY

Most of us deliver semiotics work to be assessed by others.

Maybe it used to be delivering to a professor or supervisor to have our work marked. In some of our cases it will debrief reports to a client in response to a brief but for some of us it may perhaps be to an editorial board to be peer reviewed by them for inclusion in a journal or a manuscript to a publisher. But how about if you were delivering work to a court of law, a judge, jury and subject to potential cross examination by a lawyer?

How do you think would you approach analysis differently if you were to be hired as an expert witness?

Well, in this session, we are hearing from two semioticians who have both been in this position.

Kaie and Chris each will share excerpts from their work – now able to be in the public domain – one on intellectual property infringement the other on misappropriation of public money, to show how semiotics constituted evidence as part of a winning case. This session will invite us all to consider how we meet requisite standards for credibility in our work and even defensibility, how to justify our approach, handle evidence and firm up the interpretive argument and even mitigate the limitations of semiotic study.

How is preparing an expert witness report different from commercial reports and from more standard academic articles, book manuscripts or monographs for instance?

Often the conventional wisdom is that semiotics work is either deep and scholarly but abstract or wide and less well referenced but more tangible. Well expert witness work collapses this binary since it must be very tangible and nitty gritty with real world consequences but at the same time needs to be extremely systematic and robust in design.

What are the ethics of the expert? What sort of standards do we need to hold ourselves to in doing such work? We invite you to join us as we both reflect on these questions.

So…We subpoena you to appear in court and you can judge our testimony.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, we are now adjourned until the 30th when Semiofest will be in Session.

Get tickets (suggested donations only) at the link above.

Our sessionists:

• KAIE KOPPEL has an MA in Semiotics & Theory of culture from the University of Tartu. She has explored visual semiotics, multimedia communication, and later on social innovation and semiotic theory of habit. She has been doing semiotic expert witness projects since 2005 for the Estonian Internal Security Service, Police, and Estonian Courts, and on request by private law offices. Kaie has also worked internationally with organisations like Semiotic Solutions and Creative Semiotics. In 2016 she was lucky to be organiser of Semiofest Tallinn, “Semiotics and Culture of Innovation”. Today Kaie is engaged in social and public sector innovation projects in cooperation with the Estonian Social Innovation Lab.

• CHRIS ARNING specialises in semiotics and cultural insight and he has 20 years experience working as a thinker, planner, qualitative researcher and commercial semiotician. He was Head of Semiotics at Flamingo Research and set up Creative Semiotics – a boutique consultancy – in 2010. Chris is co-founder of Semiofest, and LinkedIn Semiotic Thinking Group. He’s worked for clients as diverse as BMW Mini, Radio Centre, Hiscox and Netflix. Chris devised the MA Module, Brands & Meaning on Global Media Communication at Warwick University tutored at University of Creative Arts and teaches a course How to Do Semiotics in Seven Weeks.

SEMIOFEST SESSIONS: R/D/E | BINARIES | SEMIOTICS & UX | BODY SEMIOTICS | AI & SEMIOTICS | SEMIOTICS & CINEMA | FICTIONAL DECODERS | ON COLOUR | & more.

Also see these international semio series: COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | MAKING SENSE | COLOR CODEX | DECODER | CASE FILE