The CODE-X series catalogs a vast codex of source codes (aka “signs”) extracted from past audits.
The object of study in semiotics is not the signs but rather a general theory of signification; the goal of each “audit” is to build a model demonstrating how meaning is produced and received within a category or cultural territory. Signs on their own, therefore, only become truly revelatory and useful once we’ve sorted them into thematic complexes, and the complexes into codes, and the codes into a meaning map. We call this process “thick description”; the Code-X series is thin description.
“COSMOPOLITAN PERSPECTIVE” NORM: The last and (supposedly) best remnant of Britain’s lost empire — a natural, organic, “earned” cosmopolitanism. By contrast, Americans have the sense that our own media covers local news primarily, national news to a lesser degree, international news almost not at all.
“COSMOPOLITAN PERSPECTIVE” FORMS: Clipped, authoritative BBC voices on the radio; the Economist’s outside-in take on US politics and economics = objective truth. No-nonsense pragmatism.