Alexandra Olteanu
Biographic Data
| ID | 351923 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexandra Olteanu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexandra |
| FAMILY NAME | Olteanu |
| SIGNATURE | OLTEANU A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Shanghai International Studies University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4712-2529 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
A pandemic of desire: The entanglement of social and biomedical contagion on social media during Covid-19
While the emergence of social media rendered ‘virality’ a common buzzword, popular and scholarly conceptions of the term dichotomize virality into (online) social and (offline) biomedical contagion. We trace a line of thought, from Gabriel Tarde’s classic study on imitation as social phenomenon, to Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of the rhizome and to contemporary research on virality to develop an encompassing notion of contagion that c…
Examining trust and agency in emotionalized AI through a 4E and biosemiotic lens: A case study of AI companionship in Japan
From Print Capitalism to Data Capitalism in Japan: Desertification through Dataveillance
We argue that surveillance technologies, increasingly powered by artificial intelligence, translate print capitalism into data capitalism. We observe this transition as championed in Japan, a country favorable to its development given a strong techno-nationalism, by adopting Aurora Donzelli’s criticism of capitalism as a translation machine. Unlike traditional CCTV that simply records passersby in real-time, retail surveillance systems in Japan s…
Mapping the Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Dataveillance Discourse in Japan
We argue that dataveillance in Japan is fueled by techno-nationalist imaginaries that promise socio-economic renaissance by strengthening digital capitalism. Japanese nationalism is based on a techno-optimist imaginary which feeds enthusiasm for digitalization. We develop this argument by observing four discursive layers of dataveillance: (1) Society 5.0 - the governmental AI and ICT blueprint, (2) mass media, (3) AI vendors, and (4) the ethical,…
Les avenirs technologiques en sémiotique: Retour sur l’année 2024
Capitalul cultural, circuitul consumerist al literaturii și secularizarea istoriei. apariția romanului istoric românesc: Cultural capital, the consumerist cycle of literature, and the secularization o…
A non-specialized audience, seeking innocent literary pleasures and interested in formulaic texts, represents a distinct phase in social evolution, necessitating a bourgeois class shaped by the industrial spirit of easily consumable entertainment. In the Romanian cultural context, where the bourgeois class emerged decades after the establishment of a taste for the novel, the clear division between literature and paraliterature complicates the und…
Technological futures in semiotics: The year 2024 in review
Technological futures in semiotics: The year 2024 in review
Dumb intelligence? Translation as technological mediation
We propose a semiotic approach to understanding and assessing language technologies. Specifically, by adopting a recent semiotic and broad concept of translation, developed by Kobus Marais, we bring semiotic theory into the service of philosophy of technology. Our perspective reveals that commonly assumed expectations about language generative technologies are mistaken and misleading when shaped through an ideal of engineering humanlike interlocu…
Postdigital Literacies in Everyday Life and Pedagogic Practices
In this article, we contribute to literacy and education studies by proposing three overarching features (elements) of postdigital literacy events, informed by an ecological, relational, and sociomaterial framing of literacy. These features are: (1) entanglement, (2) digital materiality, and (3) spatiotemporality. Entanglement is about how learning entangles with our social, cultural, and material contexts through communicative acts, which includ…
The Challenge of Postdigital Literacy: Extending Multimodality and Social Semiotics for a New Age
Romanul judiciar. Către un nou subgen al romanului istoric românesc: The judicial novel: Toward a new subgenre of the Romanian historical novel
The lifespan and popularity of a subgenre are determined by the inventiveness with which novelists develop and innovate the standard formulas. The judicial novel emerges as an extension of the popularity of the outlaw novel, adding a technical dimension to the misdeeds committed by wrongdoers. The outlaw and judicial novels are anthropomorphized subgenres that set in motion symbolic models, with a central figure dominating the entire course of ev…
Transhumanism, Society and Education: An Edusemiotic Approach
We propose a semiotic framework to underpin a posthumanist philosophy of education, as contrasted to technological determinism. A recent approach to educational processes as semiotic phenomena lends itself as a philosophy to understand the current interplay between education and technology. This view is aligned with the transhumanist movement to defend techno-scientific progress as fundamental to human development. Particularly, we adopt a semiot…
Biosemiotics for postdigital living: The implications of the implications
The postdigital condition is discussed from the perspective of Paul Cobley’s biosemiotic approach to culture. While semiotics is often concerned with cultural criticism, there has been no explicit biosemiotic approach to culture, until only recently with Cobley unfurling such a research program. The key to this is the biosemiotic notion of modeling , which accounts for co-evolutionary processes encompassing biology and culture. This approach resp…
“Have you not heard, my soul […]?”: The Great Kanon of St Andrew of Crete as a multimodal autocommunicative text
This paper examines the Great Kanon (also Great Canon; in the original Greek, Ὁ Μέγας Κανών) of St Andrew of Crete (ca. 660–740) as a case study in how religious ritual texts deploy autocommunicative processes. To study this complex liturgical hymn that occupies a key role in the ritual practice of Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Christians we employ a theoretical framework rooted primarily in Juri Lotman’s theory of autocommunication, as…
Modelul gazetăresc al banditului social în romanul tâlhăresc al secolului al XIX-lea: The feuilleton model of the social bandit in the nineteenth-century outlaw novel
The popularity of the idea of social banditry is closely related to the socio-historical, economic and cultural context, and literature and history only record the reasons why the noble thief, in many variants the outlaw, become some of the central figures of the Romanian historical novel of the 19th century. The outlaw novel is detached from the literary body of the hajduk prose and proposes another series of motives for the actions of the main …
On the social and technical challenges of Web search autosuggestion moderation
Past research shows that users benefit from systems that support them in their writing and exploration tasks. The autosuggestion feature of Web search engines is an example of such a system: It helps users formulate their queries by offering a list of suggestions as they type. Such autosuggestions are typically generated by machine learning (ML) systems trained on a corpus of search logs and document representations. These automated methods can h…
A “Strong” Approach to Sustainability Literacy: Embodied Ecology and Media
This article outlines a “strong” theoretical approach to sustainability literacy, building on an earlier definition of strong and weak environmental literacy (Stables and Bishop 2001). The argument builds upon a specific semiotic approach to educational philosophy (sometimes called edusemiotics), to which these authors have been contributing. Here, we highlight how a view of learning that centers on embodied and multimodal communication invites b…
Peircean anti-psychologism and learning theory
Taking influence from Peirce’s phenomenological categories (Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness), a notion of what we call bottom-up modeling has become increasingly significant in research areas interested in learning, cognition, and development. Here, following a particular reading of Peircean semiotics (cf. Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain . London and New York: W. W. Norton; Sebeok, Thomas …
A topic network analysis of the system turn in the environmental sciences
A semiotic comparison of mass media representations of the swine flu and Covid-19 pandemics: Observing Narcissus Narcosis
This paper compares the coverage of the H1N1 and Covid-19 pandemics in ten prominent US daily newspapers. We selected articles that reference disease-specific keywords, published in the period between the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization and the first peak in laboratory- confirmed cases in the USA (20550 articles on Covid-19 and 1705 articles on H1N1). We analyzed the dataset via t…
Learning and knowing as semiosis: Extending the conceptual apparatus of semiotics
If all knowing comes from semiosis, more concepts should be added to the semiotic toolbox. However, semiotic concepts must be defined via other semiotic concepts. We observe an opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in semiotics by defining concepts of cognitive processes and phenomena via semiotic terms. In particular, we focus on concepts of relevance for theory of knowledge, such as learning, knowing, affordance, scaffolding, resources, c…
The case for a semiotic method in Earth system science: Semantic networks of environmental research
This paper sets a framework for using semiotics as an analytical method for Earth system science. It illustrates the use of such a method by analysing a dataset consisting of 32,383 abstracts of research articles pertaining to Earth system science, modelled as semantic networks. The analysis allows us to explain the epistemological advantages of this method as originating in the systems thinking common in both Earth system science and semiotics. …
Translation from a contemporary media perspective: Avoiding culturalism and monolingualism
This paper sets the premises for a translation theory, in light of the contemporary circumstances of new media, based on a concept of mediation originating in Peirce’s semiotics, as recently developed, most of all, by Lars Elleström. This view allows for defining translation as the media effects of transferring cognitive import. The approach is justified by a noticed Peirce turn in semiotics and a multimodality turn in translation studies. This v…
Rethinking educational theory and practice in times of visual media: Learning as image-concept integration
We propose a new relational direction in higher education that acknowledges external and internal images as integrated in thinking and learning. We expand educational theory and practice that commonly rely on discrete conceptual developments that exclude images. Our argument epistemologically relies on certain semiotic views that consider the role of iconic signs and iconicity (meaning making by the virtue of similarity) as significant in relatio…
Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries
Social data in digital form, including user-generated content, expressed or implicit relations between people, and behavioral traces, are at the core of popular applications and platforms, driving the research agenda of many researchers. The promises of social data are many, including understanding ``what the world thinks'' about a social issue, brand, celebrity, or other entity, as well as enabling better decision-making in a variety of fields i…
Learning and adaptation from a semiotic perspective
This paper discusses the relation between learning and adaptation, arguing that the current state of the art in semiotics suggests a continuity between the two. An overview of the relevant theories in this regard, as considered in semiotics, reveals an embodied and environmental account of learning, where language plays an important but nevertheless limited role. Learning and adaptation are seen as inseparable cases of semiotic modelling. Such a …
The Semiosic Evolution of Education: The Semiosic Evolution of Education
Learning and knowing as semiosis: Extending the conceptual apparatus of semiotics
If all knowing comes from semiosis, more concepts should be added to the semiotic toolbox. However, semiotic concepts must be defined via other semiotic concepts. We observe an opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in semiotics by defining concepts of cognitive processes and phenomena via semiotic terms. In particular, we focus on concepts of relevance for theory of knowledge, such as learning, knowing, affordance, scaffolding, resources, c…
Rethinking educational theory and practice in times of visual media: Learning as image-concept integration
We propose a new relational direction in higher education that acknowledges external and internal images as integrated in thinking and learning. We expand educational theory and practice that commonly rely on discrete conceptual developments that exclude images. Our argument epistemologically relies on certain semiotic views that consider the role of iconic signs and iconicity (meaning making by the virtue of similarity) as significant in relatio…
The case for a semiotic method in Earth system science: Semantic networks of environmental research
This paper sets a framework for using semiotics as an analytical method for Earth system science. It illustrates the use of such a method by analysing a dataset consisting of 32,383 abstracts of research articles pertaining to Earth system science, modelled as semantic networks. The analysis allows us to explain the epistemological advantages of this method as originating in the systems thinking common in both Earth system science and semiotics. …
Translation from a contemporary media perspective: Avoiding culturalism and monolingualism
This paper sets the premises for a translation theory, in light of the contemporary circumstances of new media, based on a concept of mediation originating in Peirce’s semiotics, as recently developed, most of all, by Lars Elleström. This view allows for defining translation as the media effects of transferring cognitive import. The approach is justified by a noticed Peirce turn in semiotics and a multimodality turn in translation studies. This v…
Schematic Enough to be Safe from Kidnappers: The Semiotics of Charles Peirce as Transitionalist Pragmatism
This paper explores the semiotics of Charles Peirce in relation to Colin Koopman's advocacy for a new wave of pragmatism, which he terms transitionalism. Presenting both similarities and differences between these two, the main point is that Peirce's semiotics fits the general idea of a transitionalist, as contrasted to substantialist, philosophy, even though Koopman explicitly excludes this possibility. This is argued both on the grounds of Peirc…
The implications for education of Peirce's agapist principle
In his divisions of science, Peirce placed pedagogy in the branch of practical sciences. This means that the profession of teaching can only be meliorated by experience, through practice. However, I argue that a holistic look at Peirce's semiotics reveals an implicit philosophy of education. The key lies in understanding his account of experience in the context of his theory of evolution. By experience Peirce meant semiosis (action of signs), not…
The Semiosic Evolution of Education: The Semiosic Evolution of Education
Predicating from an Early Age: Edusemiotics and the Potential of Children’s Preconceptions
This paper aims to explain how semiotics and constructivism can collaborate in an educational epistemology by developing a joint approach to prescientific conceptions. Empirical data and findings of constructivist research are interpreted in the light of Peirce’s semiotics. Peirce’s semiotics is an anti-psychologistic logic (CP 2.252; CP 4.551; W 8:15; Pietarinen in Signs of logic, Springer, Dordrecht, 2006; Stjernfelt in Diagrammatology. An inve…
The implications for education of Peirce's agapist principle
In his divisions of science, Peirce placed pedagogy in the branch of practical sciences. This means that the profession of teaching can only be meliorated by experience, through practice. However, I argue that a holistic look at Peirce's semiotics reveals an implicit philosophy of education. The key lies in understanding his account of experience in the context of his theory of evolution. By experience Peirce meant semiosis (action of signs), not…
Abduction, Hermeneutics, and the Interpretation of Interpretations
Learning and adaptation from a semiotic perspective
This paper discusses the relation between learning and adaptation, arguing that the current state of the art in semiotics suggests a continuity between the two. An overview of the relevant theories in this regard, as considered in semiotics, reveals an embodied and environmental account of learning, where language plays an important but nevertheless limited role. Learning and adaptation are seen as inseparable cases of semiotic modelling. Such a …
Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries
Social data in digital form, including user-generated content, expressed or implicit relations between people, and behavioral traces, are at the core of popular applications and platforms, driving the research agenda of many researchers. The promises of social data are many, including understanding ``what the world thinks'' about a social issue, brand, celebrity, or other entity, as well as enabling better decision-making in a variety of fields i…
Schematic Enough to be Safe from Kidnappers: The Semiotics of Charles Peirce as Transitionalist Pragmatism
This paper explores the semiotics of Charles Peirce in relation to Colin Koopman's advocacy for a new wave of pragmatism, which he terms transitionalism. Presenting both similarities and differences between these two, the main point is that Peirce's semiotics fits the general idea of a transitionalist, as contrasted to substantialist, philosophy, even though Koopman explicitly excludes this possibility. This is argued both on the grounds of Peirc…
Learning and knowing as semiosis: Extending the conceptual apparatus of semiotics
If all knowing comes from semiosis, more concepts should be added to the semiotic toolbox. However, semiotic concepts must be defined via other semiotic concepts. We observe an opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in semiotics by defining concepts of cognitive processes and phenomena via semiotic terms. In particular, we focus on concepts of relevance for theory of knowledge, such as learning, knowing, affordance, scaffolding, resources, c…
The case for a semiotic method in Earth system science: Semantic networks of environmental research
This paper sets a framework for using semiotics as an analytical method for Earth system science. It illustrates the use of such a method by analysing a dataset consisting of 32,383 abstracts of research articles pertaining to Earth system science, modelled as semantic networks. The analysis allows us to explain the epistemological advantages of this method as originating in the systems thinking common in both Earth system science and semiotics. …
Translation from a contemporary media perspective: Avoiding culturalism and monolingualism
This paper sets the premises for a translation theory, in light of the contemporary circumstances of new media, based on a concept of mediation originating in Peirce’s semiotics, as recently developed, most of all, by Lars Elleström. This view allows for defining translation as the media effects of transferring cognitive import. The approach is justified by a noticed Peirce turn in semiotics and a multimodality turn in translation studies. This v…
Rethinking educational theory and practice in times of visual media: Learning as image-concept integration
We propose a new relational direction in higher education that acknowledges external and internal images as integrated in thinking and learning. We expand educational theory and practice that commonly rely on discrete conceptual developments that exclude images. Our argument epistemologically relies on certain semiotic views that consider the role of iconic signs and iconicity (meaning making by the virtue of similarity) as significant in relatio…
A “Strong” Approach to Sustainability Literacy: Embodied Ecology and Media
This article outlines a “strong” theoretical approach to sustainability literacy, building on an earlier definition of strong and weak environmental literacy (Stables and Bishop 2001). The argument builds upon a specific semiotic approach to educational philosophy (sometimes called edusemiotics), to which these authors have been contributing. Here, we highlight how a view of learning that centers on embodied and multimodal communication invites b…
Peircean anti-psychologism and learning theory
Taking influence from Peirce’s phenomenological categories (Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness), a notion of what we call bottom-up modeling has become increasingly significant in research areas interested in learning, cognition, and development. Here, following a particular reading of Peircean semiotics (cf. Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain . London and New York: W. W. Norton; Sebeok, Thomas …
A topic network analysis of the system turn in the environmental sciences
A semiotic comparison of mass media representations of the swine flu and Covid-19 pandemics: Observing Narcissus Narcosis
This paper compares the coverage of the H1N1 and Covid-19 pandemics in ten prominent US daily newspapers. We selected articles that reference disease-specific keywords, published in the period between the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization and the first peak in laboratory- confirmed cases in the USA (20550 articles on Covid-19 and 1705 articles on H1N1). We analyzed the dataset via t…
On the social and technical challenges of Web search autosuggestion moderation
Past research shows that users benefit from systems that support them in their writing and exploration tasks. The autosuggestion feature of Web search engines is an example of such a system: It helps users formulate their queries by offering a list of suggestions as they type. Such autosuggestions are typically generated by machine learning (ML) systems trained on a corpus of search logs and document representations. These automated methods can h…
Biosemiotics for postdigital living: The implications of the implications
The postdigital condition is discussed from the perspective of Paul Cobley’s biosemiotic approach to culture. While semiotics is often concerned with cultural criticism, there has been no explicit biosemiotic approach to culture, until only recently with Cobley unfurling such a research program. The key to this is the biosemiotic notion of modeling , which accounts for co-evolutionary processes encompassing biology and culture. This approach resp…
“Have you not heard, my soul […]?”: The Great Kanon of St Andrew of Crete as a multimodal autocommunicative text
This paper examines the Great Kanon (also Great Canon; in the original Greek, Ὁ Μέγας Κανών) of St Andrew of Crete (ca. 660–740) as a case study in how religious ritual texts deploy autocommunicative processes. To study this complex liturgical hymn that occupies a key role in the ritual practice of Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Christians we employ a theoretical framework rooted primarily in Juri Lotman’s theory of autocommunication, as…
Modelul gazetăresc al banditului social în romanul tâlhăresc al secolului al XIX-lea: The feuilleton model of the social bandit in the nineteenth-century outlaw novel
The popularity of the idea of social banditry is closely related to the socio-historical, economic and cultural context, and literature and history only record the reasons why the noble thief, in many variants the outlaw, become some of the central figures of the Romanian historical novel of the 19th century. The outlaw novel is detached from the literary body of the hajduk prose and proposes another series of motives for the actions of the main …
Postdigital Literacies in Everyday Life and Pedagogic Practices
In this article, we contribute to literacy and education studies by proposing three overarching features (elements) of postdigital literacy events, informed by an ecological, relational, and sociomaterial framing of literacy. These features are: (1) entanglement, (2) digital materiality, and (3) spatiotemporality. Entanglement is about how learning entangles with our social, cultural, and material contexts through communicative acts, which includ…
The Challenge of Postdigital Literacy: Extending Multimodality and Social Semiotics for a New Age
Romanul judiciar. Către un nou subgen al romanului istoric românesc: The judicial novel: Toward a new subgenre of the Romanian historical novel
The lifespan and popularity of a subgenre are determined by the inventiveness with which novelists develop and innovate the standard formulas. The judicial novel emerges as an extension of the popularity of the outlaw novel, adding a technical dimension to the misdeeds committed by wrongdoers. The outlaw and judicial novels are anthropomorphized subgenres that set in motion symbolic models, with a central figure dominating the entire course of ev…
Transhumanism, Society and Education: An Edusemiotic Approach
We propose a semiotic framework to underpin a posthumanist philosophy of education, as contrasted to technological determinism. A recent approach to educational processes as semiotic phenomena lends itself as a philosophy to understand the current interplay between education and technology. This view is aligned with the transhumanist movement to defend techno-scientific progress as fundamental to human development. Particularly, we adopt a semiot…
Les avenirs technologiques en sémiotique: Retour sur l’année 2024
Capitalul cultural, circuitul consumerist al literaturii și secularizarea istoriei. apariția romanului istoric românesc: Cultural capital, the consumerist cycle of literature, and the secularization o…
A non-specialized audience, seeking innocent literary pleasures and interested in formulaic texts, represents a distinct phase in social evolution, necessitating a bourgeois class shaped by the industrial spirit of easily consumable entertainment. In the Romanian cultural context, where the bourgeois class emerged decades after the establishment of a taste for the novel, the clear division between literature and paraliterature complicates the und…
Sociology (22 works) · Semiotics (17 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Linguistics (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Semiosis (8 works) · Biosemiotics (6 works)