[Slling-l] Springer Nature to retract chapter on sign language critics call “unbelievably insulting”

[Mark Mandel]

The article, dated February 1, 2021, has 37 comments as I write this.
It begins:
____________________________

*Springer Nature to retract chapter on sign language critics call
“unbelievably insulting”*
<https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-8391-9_14>

Julie Hochgesang

*Springer Nature is retracting a book chapter describing conference
research after scholars in the deaf community blasted it for being
“unbelievably insulting.”*


The chapter, “Implementation of Hand Gesture Recognition System To Aid
Deaf-Dumb People,” <
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-8391-9_14>
appeared in *Advances in Signal and Data Procesing: Select Proceedings of
ICSDP 2019*. The authors were  Supriya Ghule and Mrunalini Chavaan, of the
[Maharashtra Institute of Technology] Academy of Engineering in Pune,
India.

According to the abstract:

*In recent years, the population of deaf-dumb victims has increased because
of birth defects and other issues. Since a deaf and mute person cannot talk
with an ordinary person in order that they ought to rely on some kind of
communication system. The gesture shows some physical movements of the hand
that convey a piece of information. Gesture recognition is the analytical
interpretation of the movement of an individual through an information
processing system. Linguistic communication provides the most effective
conversation platform for the mute person to speak with an ordinary person.
The aim of this paper is to build up a time system for hand gesture
recognition that acknowledges hand gestures and then converts them into
text and voice. In this paper, efforts have been done to detect 8 different
gestures. Each gesture has assigned unique sound and text output. In
experimental results, 800 samples were taken into the consideration out of
which 760 samples were detected correctly and 40 samples were detected
wrongly. Hence, the proposed system gives accuracy of 95%.*

The work caught the eye of an international group of researchers and
members of the deaf community led by Julie A. Hochgesang <
https://my.gallaudet.edu/julie-hochgesang>, of the Department of
Linguistics at Gallaudet University, in Washington, D.C., who were
“appalled” by the project, which they say was marred by a lack of
understanding of the field, pejorative and outdated language and other
problems.

*...*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/slling-l/attachments/20210207/e0176511/attachment.htm>