ling anth research about SSW

[Erika Hoffmann]

Hi Val and everyone else. I've been on these boards for a while, but
have only piped up on occasion. I'm a linguistic anthropologist who
works on Nepali Sign Language and I've used SSW to create transcripts
for the analysis of the video data I've collected. It has been a
wonderful tool and, as I've used it more and followed your discussions
on this board I have decided to not only use SSW for my research, but
also to write about it more directly.
I'll be giving a paper at the American Anthropological Association
this December about SSW. I've pasted the abstract for that paper
(which I am still writing) below. I'd like to continue to develop this
line of inquiry in the future. If I can get funding (and I think I
can) I would love to visit some centers for sign writing to extend the
ethnographic aspect of this project beyond the discussion boards. Val,
would it be possible to talk about my visiting you sometime in the
next year or so? I'm in Ohio, so I will also hope to visit the Church
in Michigan that uses SSW. Would anyone else be willing to possibly
allow me to visit them and participate in and observe your use of SSW
in your particular social context? I just want to see how receptive
list members might be to such a project.
Thanks!
AAA paper:
This paper explores the relationship between language ideology and
script by detailing emerging practices for writing sign languages.
Sign languages have traditionally been considered un-writable, a state
of affairs not due to the formal properties of sign languages but to
the ideologies about the nature of both language and writing that have
informed the development of most sign languages scripts. However,
signers worldwide are increasingly producing written sign language
texts using Sutton SignWriting (SSW), a script originally developed
for dance notation. Because this script emerged outside the rubric of
formal linguistics, its development circumvented disciplinary
ideologies in productive ways. Drawing on examples of texts produced
by SSW users, and the metalinguistic discussion of these texts on
online discussion boards, I detail the ways in which use of this
script makes visible properties of both spoken and signed language
that had been ideologically erased from linguistic analysis by the use
of scripts developed according to a spoken rather than visual language
model. This allows SSW users to explicitly articulate and challenge
dominant, and often backgrounded, ideologies about the nature of
language and writing in ways that are fruitful for public and
scholarly understandings of spoken, as well as signed, languages.



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