Semiotic Dynamics studies how the relations between language, concepts expressed by language, and the objects language is about evolve in populations of agents. Recently, social tagging sites and other types of community software systems are showing a very vital new form of semiotic dynamics. Millions of users now participate in tagging objects and in coordinating tags and the categories they imply.

From a scientific point of view, these developments are very exciting because they can be tracked in real time and the tools of complex systems science and cognitive science can be used to study them.

This Erice School is the first school ever to focus on these phenomena. Lecturers will report on the phenomena themselves, on human semiotic dynamics that can be a source of inspiration for creating new types of social sharing, and on tools that can be used to model and study the phenomena, particularly their statistical properties. The school also features hands-on workshops to quickly enter into this exciting new field and opportunities for participants to present their own work.

You can download the poster of the school here.