Transduction in Evolving Contexts of Intermodal Meaning Making: Moving Meaning Across Media, Modes, and Multiple Realities

Transduction names the process of moving meaning from one mode to another such as from speech to image or from writing to film. This shifting of meaning from one sign system to another, each with its distinctive affordances, inevitably entails a reconfiguration of meaning with certain gains and losses characterizing the different realizations.
Transduction pervades our increasingly multimedia communication world - from movie and video game adaptations of literature to graphs of international pandemic infection rates. As such, transduction is a cornerstone of multimodal social semiotics and is increasingly recognized as fundamental to learning and hence contemporary pedagogy as well as to intercultural understanding and processes of language teaching, translation and interpretation. Nevertheless, research on the nature and negotiation of transduction remains in its infancy, while innovative forms of multimodal communication continue to evolve. In this context it is imperative to pursue an understanding of how the conceptualization of transduction can explicate the nature of intermodal meaning making with the ongoing emergence of innovative sign systems and digital media such as emojis, emoticons and immersive virtual reality.

The theorization of transduction needs to be extended to emerging innovative sign systems and new digital media, but it also needs to extend beyond the current emphasis on ideational meaning to further address the nature of transduction of interpersonal and textual (compositional) meaning. The centrality of transduction in science and science education is explicitly acknowledged and substantial research is addressing the optimization of student engagement with and understanding of transduction by theorizing concepts such as ‘transductive links’, ‘persistent placeholders’ and ‘bridging models’, but it is not clear how such theorizing relates to emerging shifts from digital desktop virtual reality animation in science education to immersive virtual reality. In contexts of literature and language arts students are increasingly involved the creation of and/or response to transductions such as lyrical poems to short lyrical film, novels to movies, art works to interpretive essays etc. Here there is emphasis on image and language with less attention to the transduction involving other modes such as music, gesture and movement and limited theorizing in relation to the transduction of interpersonal and/or textual meaning. Adequate attention to transduction across multiple modes and representations of reality presupposes knowledge of, and a consensual metalanguage to describe, the semiotic affordances of the various modes, to optimize transdisciplinary research and the development of educational approaches with transduction as a core underpinning.

This collection welcomes the submission of papers from all disciplines in the form of and original documentary and empirical research and systematic reviews that address the following and related themes:

• characterizing, negotiating and responding to transduction in the context of relating experience of virtual and augmented reality texts to other modes
• the nature of the transduction of interpersonal and textual/compositional meaning, especially in relation to music, voice intonation, gesture, posture and movement
• transduction in the context of the emergence of new sign systems such as emoticons and emojis
• transduction, multimodal digital disciplinary literacy and curriculum area learning in schooling and further education
• the adoption, adaptation, development of an accessible, consensual metalanguage to describe transduction across multiple modes
• the relationship between transduction and resemiotisation, which are regarded by some as synonymous, while others see the latter relating to a shift of meaning across media, such as a live lecture and a video recording of the lecture.