Turning Signs
Turning Signs is a hypertext netbook about the process of meaning, or semiosis, which pervades all of life on Earth and beyond. It draws on many sciences, from the biophysical to the philosophical, to explore human relations with the more-than-human world. The first chapter gives a more detailed overview of the whole and the focus of each chapter.
Turning Signs can be read in many ways, online or off. A systematic reading would begin with Chapter 1 and proceed to the end of Chapter 19 (or to the Point). (Those chapters constitute the left-hand or obverse side of the Contents list below.) Others might prefer to browse or search among the rePatches (·19 to ·1) listed on the right-hand or reverse side, which consist of short pieces in point form arranged in a nonlinear order.
Those who are unable to read comfortably from a screen are free to print parts of this book as specified in the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Those willing to read online at their own pace are free to use the embedded hyperlinks as a glossary or reminder of previous chapters, or to access the unnumbered parts of the netbook:
- The preverse, a kind of guided meditation that comes before the beginning.
- The Point, or universe, a collection of very short points, each encapsulating a key idea developed in the netbook.
- The reference list and Sourcenet (links are at the top of each page in the book).
To read Turning Signs offline,
- use the link at the end of this paragraph to download the whole book as a Zip file (about 3 MB).
- Extract the contents from the Zip file to the location of your choice.
- open the TS folder in that location,
- then select and open index.html.
When your browser opens that file, you'll be reading the same page you are now, except it will be stored on your computer instead of the gnusystems website. Adjust the window and text size to your liking, just as you do with any webpage. You can also bookmark it. The Table of Contents below, and other links internal to Turning Signs, will work the same as they do online. Here's the download link:
[download Turning Signs 2.5], updated 5 December 2024.
Tip for searchers: You can search the whole book online, using the search engine of your choice (Google, Bing or whatever). Enter or paste “site:gnusystems.ca/TS” followed by a space and the term you are searching for, and the result will be a list of the pages where the term appears in TS. Then you can open and search any of those pages for the term.
You can also subscribe to the blog, so that you are notified whenever there's a new post that day. You can contact the author through it if you have comments or questions.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This book is dedicated to my best friend, beloved wife and gnusystems partner Pam Jackson.
preverse ·0· 