Week 3 - Crafty Hobos

Analyzing symbols of the hobos is definitely not as easy as you think it would be at first. The only symbols that I could make much of a guess on at all were those that seemed pretty obvious at first, but what I found is that even those were usually misleading. The best I was able to do was guess the general category of what some of the symbols were discussing, but I wasn’t able to get one actually correct.

For instance, I was able to figure out that the cross-like symbol was referring to something about religion, and the one that looks like a house, was, in fact, talking about a house, but I couldn’t get the specifics right. Others I was completely off in my guesses. For instance, the one that looks like a cat I guessed had something to do with animals in the area, when in reality it was referring to a kind lady.

The only way I could really guess the meaning of the symbols was to compare them to the meaning of symbols I am already familiar with. This is where the discrepancies arose, because not only did the hobo symbols not necessarily represent the same set of symbols I am familiar with, but in some cases they may well have been designed to be contradictory with them to confuse “outsiders”. Hobos would not have wanted the symbols to be overly obvious, as they probably did not want just anyone knowing what they were communicating to each other, especially considering that outsiders reading the messages might not necessarily be happy with the fact that hobos were hanging around the area at all.

The hobo signs are symbols at their most basic level; pictures that represent something to humans that interpret them. They can become data when they are collected together and considered as a group, perhaps by looking at them as a language, for instance. The signs are knowledge once that collection of data has been interpreted by someone, for instance, if someone were to start studying and analyzing the language of the hobos, kind of like we did with a few of the symbols. If this person were then to start comparing other languages to the hobo symbols or to start developing his own theories about their significance and development, then they would become knowledge.