Medium Specificity

For this project, I decided to use the medium of digital photography. Why? Because I wanted to juxtapose my experience with two different languages: English and American Sign Language. As an English teaching major, I spend a great deal of time in the dictionary. However, for a long time, and ASL dictionary did not exist. Modern recording tools and the relatively widespread availability of the internet have allowed ASL video dictionaries to be created, but before video was widely accessible, ASL users just had each other to help define words. The lack of a standardized dictionary contributed to the many dialects of ASL that exist within the USA today.

The visual nature of ASL makes a printed dictionary almost impossible, though many have tried. ASL is dependent on motion: the same handshape can mean several different things, depending on the motion it is portrayed in. Thus, written ASL dictionaries have many arrows to indicate this motion. Photography (and printed images) limit ASL expression. I can tell you from firsthand experience that these images can be hard to decipher. For example:

In the image at the beginning of this post, I am signing "music." I chose to sign this word for a few reasons: first, because Deaf people don't engage in the digital medium of recorded music in the same that hearing people do, and secondly because the actual movement of the sign creates a visual that, even for those unfamiliar with ASL, makes sense as "music." 

The benefits of using photography in this way allowed me to critique the printed dictionaries for ASL, as well as to show the critical role motion plays in signing. I liked the way the camera blurred my right hand. It was unable to capture the full extent of the motion, but it was able to show that motion was happening. It would be interesting to create a similar image using long-exposure photography as well.

This assignment forced me to think in a new way. Normally, when I am creating any sort of media, I first spend time thinking of the most appropriate medium with which to express my creativity. For this project, I had to think backwards and decide which medium would be less successful and why. I think that this backward thinking made me more conscious of my choices. Creating projects that force my future students to think backward--even in their writing--could help them learn to defend their choices.