Recurring iconic mapping patterns within and across verb types in German Sign Language

Many sign languages around the world have the same tripartite verb classification system based on agreement properties, and it has previously been observed that this system is at least partially semantically grounded. In this article, the extent to which iconicity plays a mediating role in this relationship between verb type and verb semantics is investigated through the identification of recurring iconic mappings across verb forms in German Sign Language (DGS). The aim is to establish which event properties are commonly iconically represented in DGS verb forms, and which of those can additionally be associated with verbs of a specific type. The results indicate that across types, handshape is associated with semantic transitivity, while the location and movement specifications of a verb form are associated with verb type. The results thus contribute toward our understanding of the role of iconicity in the relation between verb semantics and verb type in DGS and, by extension, other sign languages with similar verb type systems

Cartography I: Mapping narrative cartography

This report focuses on the growing interest in the relationship between maps, narratives and meta-narratives. Following a brief historical contextualization of these relationships, this report explores their current state in the Geoweb era. Using the distinction between story maps and grid maps as an analytical framework, I review emerging issues around the extensive use of technologies and online mapping services (i.e. Google maps) to convey stories and to produce new ones. Drawing on literature in film studies, literary studies, visual arts, computer science and communication I also emphasize the emergence of new forms of spatial expressions interested in providing different perspectives about places and about stories associated to places. In sum, I argue that mapping both vernacular knowledge and fiction is central understanding places in depth

Knowing the city: maps, mobility and urban outreach work

This article is concerned with the relationship between (pedestrian) movement and (local) knowledge. Drawing upon ethnography conducted with a team of urban outreach workers, the article considers mapping, and specifically the use of Global Positioning System technology, as a method with which to document the spatial distribution of the team’s practice as they search for and locate their rough-sleeping client group. Outreach workers are experts in the terrain in which they operate; maps of their movements, therefore, might be said to entail a mapping of knowledge, enacted in movement, and our informants do not move randomly, but knowledgeably. Our argument, however, grounded in an attention to the way in which knowledge and movement combine in the street-level practices of urban outreach, provides a foundation for a critique of mapping as an analytic practice in and through which relations of knowing and going can be shown and understood