Arandic sand stories from Central Australia are a traditional form of narrative in which co-speech graphics form an essential part of a composite multimodal utterance. In these stories a narrator may use a range of verbal and visual elements including speech, sign, gesture and drawing. They may also use material objects, such as sticks and leaves, to establish a visual field akin to a miniature stage-set on which the action of the story unfolds. A stick or a soft bent wire may be used both as a drawing implement and to provide rhythmic accompaniment.
In order to understand the complexity of how these stories are orchestrated a multimodal approach is essential. This approach to understanding communicative processes broadens the field of linguistic enquiry to include not only speech, sign and gesture but also potentially other expressive media including the body and objects in the environment (Goodwin 2000, 2003, Goodwin & Goodwin 1992, Hutchins & Klausen 1996, Enfield 2003, 2005). Goodwin (2003) takes one further step and includes tracing and inscription as legitimate components of what he refers to as ‘situated interactive activity’. Meaning can thus be viewed as a socially constructed 'embodied practice' (Hindmarsh & Heath 2003).
In this talk I provide an overview of the various forms of sand-drawing, and explain my processes of segmenting and representing sand story data. I suggest that an understanding of the dynamism of drawing and its integration with other semiotic systems broadens our understanding of what gesture is.
Authors: Jenny Green
Event: SF08: Embodied Interaction in Mobile, Physical and Virtual Environments Workshop