The digital approach to semiotics: a systematic review

Abstract This article traces the presence of the concept digital semiotics in scientific literature with the aim of constituting a corpus of study that would allow to identify its goals and fields of interest. We undertook a systematic review of the term in the most important academic databases. We obtained 389 records and analyzed each of them in terms of publication date, type, content, and synthesis of contributions that develop distinct lines of investigation in digital semiotics. The results show a reduced number of first level publications that approach in detail this object of inquiry while establishing multimodal semiotics and social semiotics as the most consolidated branches. However, we found an increasing amount of gray literature that paves the way towards a deeper semiotic research tradition in the 21st century. We conclude by calling for a revision of semiotics, understood as a field of study that brings together interdisciplinary relationships and methodological solutions that interrogate the digital culture.