The blog title wasn’t the title of the paper, but that was the main idea behind “Measuring diagram quality through semiotic morphisms”, published in Semiotica 2021.

Exec summary

In this paper, I summarise a history of diagramming, and propose some ways to measure diagram quality, “based on the properties of their encoding, pragmatic and perceptual morphisms”. What this means is we can try to split out:

• The process of capturing what we want to in a diagram
• The process of interpreting the diagram; and
• The actual usage of the diagram to support a particular task.

This is important in business too, just think about system architecture diagrams. There are a multitude of different things a system architecture diagram could capture, from the code itself, through to the modules, the dependencies (on packages or on other systems or data), non-functionals such as security, the tech stack, etc etc. Whether the thing captured in the diagram is any use to anyone depends on what it is used for and then, almost secondarily, on how well that information is laid out in the diagram. If I had one take-away from this paper, it is:

Consider your user when creating a diagram!

And finally

This paper was particularly special because it won the Mouton d’Or award, for being the best paper in the journal in 2021! The judges very kindly wrote:

The Committee members made this decision based on several factors. First, Diagrams have always played a significant role in the explication of theoretical concepts in semiotics. This essay provides an excellent overview of the semiotic diagram and its use as a pedagogical and instrumental visual to advance semiotic theory. It also applies taxonomy and category theory to assess the quality of a diagram. Second, this essay provides an evaluation metric for diagrams in semiotic theory. Third, this article provides an organized and comprehensible discussion and evaluation of the form and function of the diagram in semiotic research. Finally, the authors have applied taxonomy and category theory to the interdiscipline of semiotics to evaluate diagram quality.

Semiotica Mouton d’Or judges (see also https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/semi/html)

This research inspired the creation of thediagramsguy.com – a consulting service which aims to improve diagramming in businesses.