semiography

Noun

semiography (usually uncountable, plural semiographies)

1. (usually) A description of the signs of disease.
   • In treating of the semiography of the disease, Dr Hope restores to its place among the rational signs, that of jugular venous pulsation, or turgescence of the jugular veins, with pulsation synchronous with that of the arteries, originally specified by Lancisi, but rejected on insufficient grounds...1832, J. Hope, “A Treatise on the Diseases of the Heart and Great Vessels, comprising a new View of the Physiology of the Heart's Action, according to which the Physical Signs are explaiend”, in The...
   • The most perplexing part of the semiography and symptomatology is this, that these purulent collections cause almost no uneasy feelings, till by their size they induce distension or painful stretching of the organ, or pressure or tension of some of the surrounding parts.1848, David Craigie, Elements of General and Pathological Anatomy, page 180
2. (usually) A system of symbolic notation, especially (but not always) as opposed to phonetic notation.
   • Masson's semiography, rectifying millennia of scrptorial history, refers us not to origins (what do we care about origins?) but to the body: it imposes upon us not the form (banal proposition of all pointers) but the figure, i.e., the elliptical collision of two signifiers: the gesture beneath...2001, Roland Barthes, “Masson's semiography”, in Jed Rasula, Steve McCaffery, editor, Imagining Language: An Anthology, page 46
   • As exemplified by the above quotes, both meaning-based writing, or semiography, and sound-based writing, or phonography, have been envisioned by influential thinkers who viewed the graphic expression of pure reason and pure sound, respectively, as ideals to be pursued in the design of writing...2003, Florian Coulmas, Writing Systems: An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis, page 18
3. (usually, more specifically) A system of musical notation.
   • Metallov further assumed that Græco-Syrian semiography came to Russia through Mt. Athos; but as we mentioned earlier, Athos at that time was still relatively young as a monastic state, although it was inhabited by monks of various countries.1980, Johann von Gardner, Vladimir Morosan, Russian Church Singing, page 115
   • Musical semiography seldom takes into account the obvious loss of the mediating function in some primarily graphic features of contemporary music notations, which differ greatly from conventional notation, as a standardly efficient mediator between the composer's idea, its notational fixation in a...2016, Mikša Gligo, “Graphic notation and musical graphics: The nonnotational sign systems in new music and its multimedial, intermedial, extended-medial, and mixed-medial character”, in Winfried...
4. (usually) The study of symbolic systems or of a particular symbolic system.
   • Abundant graphic documentation of Frutiger's work, together with the books by Shepherd and Dreyfus, serve as the basis for modern comprehension of the principles of semiography.1996, Semiotic Society of America, Semiotics, page 201
   • While documentation of a life is essential to semiography, as it is to biography, semiography's focus is to interpret how the pieces of the puzzle fit together as a cultural production rather than a chronology. Semiography explores the ideal images of a performer, the public performances in which...2007, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image, page 5