A Methodological Study

Résumé du livre

A methodology for identifying the semiotic content of information transformations is described. The semiotic analysis procedure was developed and tested using military intelligence as the knowledge domain. Two teams, comprised of a psychologist and a military intelligence expert, analyzed the content of narratives produced by other intelligence analysts to identify syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic relationships. Then the content between narratives was examined to determine the kind of semiotic transformations that were used to change or augment the semiotics. The final results of the analysis were based on the consensus reached by the two teams. The procedure was applied to narratives produced by three military intelligence analysts. For two different levels of war scenarios, individual differences and similarities in information use were demonstrated for (a) how the same individual used information, given the same contexts, and (b) how different individuals used information, given the same context. The benefits of the procedure to the military intelligence knowledge domain and its applicability to other domains are discussed.