The Analysis of Visual Texts in Structural and Interpretive Semiotics

Semiotic analyses of visual texts allow us to capture meanings that are not immediately evident in visual communication and which other methods, such as more 'rigorous' content analysis, would fail to identify. However, researchers sometimes find semiotics difficult to approach, because of both the difficult, specialized language of many important contributions and the criticism of 'subjectivity' that surrounds the interpretive methods. This essay seeks to facilitate the diffusion of semiotic methods by: i) crearly describing a step-by-step procedure that can be employed to decode visual texts; ii) discussing procedures to overcome criticism based on the reliability and validity of results.