Photocaligraphy: Writing Sign Language

Abstract

The de facto language of deaf people is sign language, a gesture based communication process. Being quite different from oral languages (grammar, modality, syntax), it needs a writing system of its own. Despite a few attempts, no clear writing system for sign language has emerged. The work we present in this chapter constitutes a contribution to its formation through a graphic design approach. Our hypothesis is as follows: in its execution, the gestural signs contain readable graphic traces. In order to visualise them, we use a photographic system based on long exposure, creating graphic objects we name photocalligraphies. We experimented with deaf people and created two corpora made up of isolated signs. With the first one we study the legibility of such a representation of a sign: how well it is recognised, how well its meaning is conveyed. With the second we deepen the study of something we observed during the realisation of the first corpus: during the photographic capture of the signs, the sign language speaker makes alterations to the prototypic sign, signing it differently in order to make its graphic rendering more readable. We then discuss potential structures for those alterations that we call graphic inscribing strategies.