I am creating an open-source tool for semiotically “decoding” advertisements

Hey! I’ve been working on a side project called Signum Decoder, and I figured people here might find it interesting (or have strong opinions about what I’m doing with theory lol).

A small note on why I made this: the project was inspired by Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements, and really came out of my own curiosity about how advertising structures what feels like “reality” in everyday life. How products, identities, values, desires, status, normality, etc. get connected to each other and presented as if those connections were natural or self-evident. The software is basically my attempt to explore that question in a more systematic way.

I wanted to experiment with turning some of the process of decoding an advertisement into a more explicit, inspectable structure.

The basic idea is to take an ad apart in stages: first identifying relatively concrete things that are actually present in the image, then building interpretive claims about how those elements produce meaning, and finally relating those claims to concepts such as signifier/signified, referent systems, ideology, naturalization, subject positions, commodity fetishism, etc.

One thing I’ve tried to be quite strict about is separating what is actually observable in the advertisement from what is being interpreted from it. Interpretive claims are linked back to specific observations/evidence rather than presenting the whole reading as one seamless explanation.

The rough structure is:

image → observations → claims → evidence links → semiotic concepts → decode

There’s also a controlled glossary of concepts used in the analysis. I’ve spent quite a bit of time refining that because terms that seem straightforward in isolation can become surprisingly slippery once you try to define their boundaries and distinguish, for example, denotation from connotation, signified from referent system, or observation from ideological interpretation.

The software uses a local vision model to help carry out the analysis, but the part I’m most interested in is the conceptual framework itself: whether this kind of semiotic/ideological reading can be represented in a structured way without reducing it to a checklist.

I definitely don’t see the resulting decode as an authoritative interpretation. Part of the experiment is precisely figuring out where formalising this kind of analysis is useful, and where the formalisation starts flattening ambiguity, historical context, contradiction, polysemy, etc.

It’s local-first and open source if anyone wants to poke around:

https://github.com/rekomakela/signum-decoder

I’d genuinely be interested in criticism from people here, especially around the conceptual model, the categories I’m using, and anything that feels theoretically dubious or overly rigid.

Also, this is very much a work in progress. I’m building it mostly out of curiosity and learning as I go, so I’d genuinely appreciate any suggestions, reading recommendations, conceptual corrections, or ideas for how the project could be made better.