Atomistic versus holistic semiotics

Writing: a Holistic or Atomistic Entity?

The marked shift in writing instruction from a focus on writing as a set of separate, sequential tasks to a focus on writing as a holistic gestalt prompted the empirical study reported in this paper. We sought to determine whether any prerequisite relationships existed between five analytical components of ESL composition, namely content, organization, vocabulary, language use, and mechanics. O...

Comparing holistic and atomistic evaluation of evidence

Fact finders in legal trials often need to evaluate a mass of weak, contradictory and ambiguous evidence. There are two general ways to accomplish this task: by holistically forming a coherent mental representation of the case, or by atomistically assessing the probative value of each item of evidence and integrating the values according to an algorithm. Parallel constraint satisfaction (PCS) m...

Holistic Versus Analytic Perceptual Affordances

Westerners’ perceptions tend to focus on salient foreground objects, whereas Asians are more inclined to focus on contexts. We hypothesized that such culturally specific patterns of attention may be afforded by the perceptual environment of each culture. In order to test this hypothesis, we randomly sampled pictures of scenes from small, medium, and large cities in Japan and the United States. ...

Instrument Semiotics

In this and the following companion paper, Tearing Interfaces Apart, we shall present a theoretical semiotic analysis of interfaces and demonstrate how this analysis can be coupled to an empirical analysis of a work domain and its changing needs for information. The work domain is maritime maneuvering and navigation. We do this by exploiting two senses of the concept “analysis”. “Analysis” mean...

Predicting dislocation climb: Classical modeling versus atomistic simulations