It was a nice coincidence that this week I have to present for another one of my classes on Umberto Eco's A Theory of Semiotics. As an exercise to work through the material, I wondered how I could visualize an idea from the book that could work better to explain it than simply describing Eco's idea verbally.

I began to re-present this revised semantic model using Prezi, with an updated example and using a non-verbal example for the sign-vehicle:

While the visual representation (I believe) is more helpful than the ones in the book, I was not convinced that this was a significant improvement on the verbal description of the ideas. However, while thinking through the affordances of Prezi, I came up with a way that, based on the representation of the revised semantic model, I could also visualize the idea of infinite semantic recursivity---that any unit used to analyze a sememe was in turn a sememe that could be analyzed in the same way. The infinite depth provided by Prezi allows to show this recursivity without overly complicating the visualization, so that further iterations could be zoomed in and "made visible" from within the original model.

In order to see this in its 3-D space, you'll have to click on the link: http://prezi.com/6won9ufgddm7/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share