ling anth research about SSW

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
October 14, 2009

Hello Erika!
Thank you for this message!

I am running to an appointment so will write again tomorrow, but of  
course it would be great to hold a small seminar on SignWriting here  
in my home in La Jolla, California...Lets talk more about that idea -  
Val ;-)




On Oct 14, 2009, at 9:40 AM, Erika Hoffmann wrote:

> 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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