Linguistic Landscape - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2017

In daily life, we experience dynamic visual input referred to as the “linguistic landscape” (LL), comprised of images and text, for example, signs, and billboards ( Gorter, 2013 ; Landry & Bourhis, 1997 ; Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Barni 2010). While much is known about LLs descriptively, less is known about what people notice when viewing LLs. Building upon the bilingual eye movement reading literature (e.g., Whitford, Pivneva, & Titone, 2016 ) and the scene viewing literature (e.g., Henderson & Ferreira, 2004 ), we report a preliminary study of French-English bilinguals’ eye movements as they viewed LL images from Montréal. These preliminary data suggest that eye tracking is a promising new method for investigating how people with different language backgrounds process real-world LL images.

This article explores methodological challenges and scientific perspectives of a citizen science approach to linguistic landscapes research. Starting from the outline of a disciplinary landscape, the text first discusses development strategies and practical implementation of crowdsourcing via mobile applications as means to data collection in two participatory research projects. The comparison highlights the complex trade-off between empirical benefits and methodological drawbacks in relation to mobile app setups for crowdsourcing. In a second step, the use of crowdsourcing technology is embedded in a methodological framework for a citizen science approach to the study of social semiotics and discussed against the background of five guiding principles: participatory research, lifeworld orientation, societal engagement, computational analysis, and open research practice. The discussion points out that a citizen science approach brings about numerous opportunities as well as substantial challenges for academic practice in terms of a democratization, social embedding, and opening of research activities.

The past few years have seen a redefining of the linguistic landscape to become inclusive of the wide variety of semiotic encounters that people have each day. The current article partakes in this expansion by looking to the ever-shifting nature of the LL of mass-scale events, particularly protests. In particular, the current article outlines a method for designing LL studies of mass-scale events, including data collection, data analysis, and presentation of findings. The strengths and limitations of such a method are also discussed, paying particular attention to the experiential nature of mass-scale events and importance of transparent researcher positionality and reflexivity.

This paper argues that studies of the LL could merit from a more detailed social semiotic examination of particular sign-genres. It describes genre as normative system open to change, on the one hand, and as complex historical and cultural configurations of semiotic resources and affordances, on the other. Based on illustrative analysis of how the discursive interaction of ‘pride’ and ‘profit’ is affecting Galician and Basque street-name signing, the paper makes the following points: (1) genre depends on discourse, and discourse depends on genre; (2) particular materializations of a genre actualize distinct resources and highlight different affordances; (3) detailed and contextualized analysis of determined sign genres can reveal ideological layering in the LL; (4) when a genre is taken ‘out of place’ or is recontextualized, its typical repertoire of resources is rearranged and new affordances emerge.

In ethnographically oriented linguistic landscape studies, social spaces are studied in co-operation with research participants, many times through mobile encounters such as walking. Talking, walking, photographing and video recording as well as writing the fieldwork diary are activities that result in the accumulation of heterogeneous, multimodal corpora. We analyze data from a Hungarian school ethnography project to reconstruct fieldwork encounters and analyze embodiment, the handling of devices (e.g. the photo camera) and verbal interaction in exploratory, participant-led walking tours. Our analysis shows that situated practices of embodied conduct and verbal interaction blur the boundaries between observation and observers, and thus LL research is not only about space- and place-making and sense-making routines, but the fieldwork encounters are also transformative and contribute to space- and place-making themselves. Our findings provide insight for ethnographic researchers and enrich the already robust qualitative and quantitative strategies employed in the field.