Popular media outlets pay scant attention to the deaf community, and on the rare occasion that is does the reports are often clothed in raggedly mundane observations dressed up in hyperbole. Therefore, when I heard that a new documentary on sign language was being screened in Columbus, I was eager and skeptical at the same. “Voices from El-Sayed” is an honest and simple portrait of life in a Bedouin community in southern Israel, which claims the highest rate of deafness in the world. As a result, sign language is prevalent throughout the community, not just for deaf residents but for the hearing residents, as well, thus avoiding the linguistic isolation and oppression experienced by many deaf individuals around the world.

The movie is filmed deliberately yet passionately by a director that is clearly invested in this project. Oded Adomi Leshem is a young Israeli filmmaker from Tel Aviv, who, in his comments following the screening, demonstrated an admirable sense of justice, not only for the subjects of his film but for the Muslim Bedouin people with whom he interacted. The movie is mostly thoughtful and patient, and when there is action is almost always happens in the foreground, intensifying the visual scene. (Think of the more intense ausbergers-esce moments of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close but without the special effects.) 

Is there anything not to like about this modest and sincere film? With no disrespect to the film itself or its director, the film did not break out of the mold I’ve come to expect from popular representations of the Deaf community. The film is unreflexive at several moments, raising the viewers awareness that the film is not innocently made, but made through the eyes of someone who finds novelty in ways only a hearing person can. In one scene, the main character is sleeping in a room with a loud generator. The camera pans back and forth between him and the loud generator highlighting - in hyperbolic juxtaposition - the inability of the main character to hear.

The story of Oded Adomi Leshem's involvement in this film, which he explain afterwards, confirms this suspicion. He was driving through the desert and stopped off in a village at a bedouin grocer for food when he noticed children signing with one another. He was fascinated and followed them down the path, increasingly intrigued by what he might only have understood as gestures at the time. He later found out that deafness was common in this community and sign language was prevalent throughout hearing and deaf residents. He returned cameraless at first, and then gradually obtained approval by those residents to be filmed. Clearly his personal sincerity is not in question, but this kind of “ah-ha!” filmography is well-rewarded (okay, probably not that well-rewarded) in a society that is generally just ignorant enough about people who are deaf to be wowed by such self-congratulatory revelations.

The take home point for me is that despite decades now of academic research, ASL classes in college, popular movies and literature, religious programs in sign language, and K-12 mainstreaming, people who are deaf are still widely viewed as exceptions, novelties, peaceful savages, and canvasses for cosmopolitan (hearing) people to paint their anxieties upon. But don't let that completely dissuade you; we all have to start somewhere. And Leshem's movie is as good or better than most. Just please don't watch the movie and feel like you now "understand" the lives of people who are Deaf.

Just today I began reading "The German Genius", the industrial-sized history of German Kultur recently published by Peter Watson. At 856 pages it's the second largest book I own behind only Victor Hugo's burning but only half-engulfed Les Miserablés.

My interest in the book is motivated by a simple question: What is Germany? 

Since my initial exposure to German and after having visited Germany on more than one occasion, I am left with the impression of a deep fracture between the Germany of my American imagination and the embodied Germany of today. Indeed, my repeated visits to book stores and libraries in search of a history of Germany are always frustrated by the narrow but over-sold window which opens up (muddily, I might add) upon the years between 1933 and 1945. The awkward amalgam of American fetishism for the technologies of war-making ("Fighter Planes of World War II") as well as an undying obsession with the gratuitous violence enacted upon minorities in other countries ("Auschwitz: a New History") produces a cartoonish understanding of Germany. (In fact, one of the most popular graphic novels today is "Maus", a history of Nazi Germany told through a comic book mice.) 

I often try to imagine if historians reduced U.S. history to its corresponding exterminations and institutional racisms for the kind of popular public consumption that drives World War II literature: "Tools and Technologies of Slavery", and "Native Americans: The Extermination of Those People". This is no apologetic for what should rightly be a thoroughly condemning examination of the atrocities of the past. But I suspect, first, that such a narrow view of Germany misses important historical events (if you'll excuse a momentary lapse into historical fundamentalism), and second that a focus on World War II in Germany creates a moral landscape which valorizes warfare and justifies American aggression in its purported incomparability to the Holocaust.

Watson's claim is to deal directly with both the history of Nazism and German history without compressing one under the teleology of the other. It's a book I expect to take the better part of this year to complete. But having launched effortlessly into the first 100 pages of rewarding and well-composed text this evening, I expect the time to be worth it.

In this video from Rock Center last night, Janette Sadik-Khan talks about changing streets in NYC back to places for people to enjoy rather than to just drive through.

I just got back from two weeks in Germany, where a strange thing scratched at my curiosity. I was riding a friend's bicycle around one day when I came across this sculpture – a piece I had seen several times before outside the local government building near the old city center.

Where had I seen this before? I realized it several days later after I returned to Columbus. It was strikingly similar to the sculpture outside of the new student center on the campus of Columbus State Community College.

Despite the differences between these two pieces, this could not be simply a coincidence. I started by looking up the piece from Mainz. It was titled "Lebenskraft" (which means something like "vitality") and had been erected in 1979 by Spanish artist Andreu Alfaro (Spanish / German). You can find little of Alfaro in English, but Wikipedia has a page in both Spanish and German, from which I understand him to be an influential constructivist artist working who used metals in ways others had not done before. Interesting. Next, I visited the Columbus State piece in search of a signature or artist description. it was not Alfaro, but David Barr, who is also an experienced if slightly more contemporary sculpture with a long resume of accomplishments. 

I emailed Barr and asked him about the relationship between his work and Alfaro, whether there was a personal or professional connection between them. I'm sure he will waste no time in responding to my random email, and when I get answers I'll let you know what he says.

The Arcade in Cleveland is one of the oldest (or the oldest standing) mall of its day in North America while Eaton Centre in Toronto is one of the biggest. I just think it's fascinating to see these spaces of consumption pictured here alongside each other. I feel lucky to have seen both of them in a few month period, where the feelings of both spaces resonated clearly with each other, even as there is a clear evolution of the engineering of space in the 70 years between their respective construction.

Two articles came out in the past week about transportation problems, and both present radically different analyses of the problem and the solution. The first is by Bill Ford, the great-grandson of Henry Ford. For Ford, gridlock can be solved by technological innovation – by getting cars to "talk to each" other (because that's the problem with cars these days, they're introverts) and by building smart roads. The other article, by Elisabeth Rosenthal, describes explicitly car-reducing changes to planning in cities like Zurich and Munich. This vision of the transportation problem focuses on the social aspects of mobility. I easily side with the approach described by cities in Rosenthal's article and I hope that someday U.S. cities will wake up and start building cities we can live in instead of building infrastructure to drive through. 

Here are excerpts and the links to the original articles.

Why the world faces a massive traffic jam
by Bill Ford
"We need smart cars and smart infrastructure that communicate with each other while using real-time data to maximize their efficiency. We also need to tie in innovative and unique solutions that in their own way address global gridlock."

Across Europe, Irking Drivers Is Urban Policy
by Elisabeth Rosenthal
"Around Löwenplatz, one of Zurich’s busiest squares, cars are now banned on many blocks. Where permitted, their speed is limited to a snail’s pace so that crosswalks and crossing signs can be removed entirely, giving people on foot the right to cross anywhere they like at any time."

With my thesis completed and the defense pending, I can get on with a much-deserved relaxing summer. This means, of course, that I have already begun to tug at the several inviting strands poking out of the tangled ball of string that occupies the cavity behind my eyes where my brain ought to be. 

One of those strands is what I guess I'll call "research management". Even when I started the MA program I knew this: the goal of a research-oriented MA degree is to demonstrate a rough ability to come up with a project and execute it. It's a bit like making it through nursing school or any professional program. You don't get out of a nursing program ready to work with patients. Having a nursing degree just tells employers you're slightly less likely to kill someone under your care than someone off the street. Similarly, for as much as I – and my hard-working peers – do our very best to come up with well-theorized research projects grounded in original and convincing data, the real goal of our theses is to show that we can do social science research without breaking any major laws, causing and personal or public harm, and, if it's not too much bother, even say something novel about the world. Assuming that I make it through the defense (not an assumption I take lightly), I will have the chance to do more research. Isn't that enough?

No, probably not. One of the things that bugged me throughout the MA was the difficult time I had corralling pieces of the project together. Trying to keep track of all the relevant (or possibly relevant) theoretical sources, scraps of qualitative and quantitative data, and optimizing time spent on field research was a bit like herding the proverbial family of very ornery cats. This is natural in any field, not just academic research – just look at the office of any attorney, private practice doctor, or school teacher. However, as I've always been a bit obsessed with organization, I consider it a personal goal to get better at managing the research process and the data generated from research.

How to proceed? A few years ago I read an article by David Allen, creator of the Get Things Done system of task management. (Okay, it's kind-of cheezy pop business lit, but give me a break.) He said one thing that stuck with me: the human mind is terrific at analyzing one thing, but terrible at keeping track of lots of different things. For instance, when I focused on particular problems within my field research, I could generate new ideas, make connections to related issues, and so on. But it was difficult to keep track of all the pieces of information that make up the whole research project, or even just remember the final conclusions from my last intense work session. In the first example, I could focus and think through a specific problem. In the second example, my brain had to keep track of dozens of files and ideas spread across documents, scraps of paper, my field notebook, maps in ArcGIS, and PDF's on both my Mac and Windows partitions. My brain wasn't so good at the second part. 

One thing that helped greatly was Scrivener. Scrivener is a piece of software that lets you keep all your different chapters, sections, and ideas together in one project while you work on smaller pieces at a time. For example, in one project titled "MA Thesis", I had all my conference papers, grant proposals, term papers, and concrete ideas together in one place. This made some parts of writing the thesis much easier. Word is the dominant writing software, though, so I regularly had to export it to Word for comments and edits, and finally to format it for the University. Word is not my friend, and while I did get a final draft out, it was too much hassle for my taste.

Scrivener, however, is writing oriented, not analysis oriented. (Not that I'm making a too narrow distinction between the two.) So when I needed to look at my original data I had it spread across tons of Excel spreadsheets, several versions of ArcGIS projects, exported maps, interview transcripts, and documents I obtained in the field. I should say that I am pretty well-organized, and I could usually get to the data pretty easily. But no matter how clearly and logically folders on my three hard drives were organized, I could never look at all my data in one place. Furthermore, I didn't have metadata that tied all this data together. You can only append Excel files with versions ("Statistical Analysis Spreadsheet v.7") so many times before it becomes completely meaningless. 

So here's the end of that matter. I'm surveying a number of software solutions to these problems. Here's the list of packages I'm exploring to help for the PhD.

Filemaker Pro 11 – I should have used this from the beginning to code documents instead of putting it into an Excel spreadsheet. Excel is great at statistics, but it's lousy at organizing and searching data. I think four times out of five, a database should be used instead of a spreadsheet. It's possible to create a database accessible by other researchers which can serve as a repository of raw data, field contacts, and research activity. There's also a mobile app call Filemaker Go which has some fieldwork possibilities, as well.

Nvivo – There's debate about the value of qualitative analysis software. Clearly the most important thing from a research perspective is to have a clear framework for your research. However, Nvivo appears to be a terrific solution for organizing research. In fact, I much prefer that Nvivo (like Atlas ti and Maxqda) be called "qualitative research organization software" than "qualitative analysis software". It doesn't actually analyze anything for you; you have to do that yourself.

Adobe InDesign – For producing a final draft of a long document, Adobe InDesign is superior. It give you much more control – and more predictable control – over the the layout, text, and graphics. I suppose if you don't have any graphics whatsoever InDesign is a waste. But then again, if you don't have pictures...that's just, well, boring. Apple Pages is actually my favorite because it handles graphics and text so well, but it lacks in some essential areas such as making a list of figures, charts, and chapters (it can only do one at a time, not all three). 

ArcGIS – I already used ArcGIS for some data analysis, but now that I've learned a bit more about databases in general through Filemaker Pro, I'm beginning to see some interesting and unconventional uses of ArcGIS to store and represent data. I need more time with this software.

All three of these (and others that I'm looking into) have a steeper learning curve than typical software. However, I think the payoff will be huge in terms of organizing and using data instead of spending time hunting for it and re-creating it every time I want to put it into a document. (I can't tell you how many times I re-made maps in ArcGIS because the PDF's I exported were just off slightly. I lost a year of my life from stress, I'm sure.) So that's it. I'm having fun exploring these software packages and I'll hopefully have a more professional workflow for my PhD research. 

Update (13 June 2011): "The Bilingual Advantage" from the New York Times. Your brain wins when you are bilingual... but you have to use both languages regularly. High school Spanish isn't enough.

I love the commercials which mock fickle cell phone reception, mostly because it doesn't take faulty technology to show how fragile human communication is. Ever since I was a freshman in high school I've been fascinated by languages. By tragedy or providence I've had the opportunity to learn (with various degrees of success) ASL, Spanish, and German. I think learning foreign languages are crucial to maintaining an understanding of differences, while it seems globalization makes it easier than ever for US'ers stay in a language bubble. So check it – here's my own list of myths and realities about learning a second language.

Myth and Reality

1. Myth: I have to be fluent in a foreign language for it to matter. Reality: Even just a little familiarity with another language can help you appreciate the perspectives of others and to situate your own world view. Language is about connecting with people. If you show that you're willing to learn about others, you open the possibility for mutual exchange.
2. Myth: Everyone in the world speaks English, so I don't have to learn a second language. Reality: You can go all the way around the world and speak only English. But that path would probably be driven more your monolingualism than the objective truth that "everyone speaks English". Furthermore, it would greatly limit you ability to build cross-cultural relationships that last beyond ordering food or buying a bus ticket.
3. Myth: Anything I need to know is translated into English. Reality: Like #2, this logic is more circular than causal. Only 3% of works published in the United States are translations (learn more here), a mere fraction compared to many other countries. Second language ability helps you to appreciate the diversity and depth of work available in other languages, and might help decenter our American-centric views of knowledge.
4. Myth: People in the U.S. speak only English, while people in other countries often speak four or five languages. Reality: This might be true in some places. But there are many non-English languages spoken in the U.S. numbering over a million: Spanish, Chinese, German, French, Vietnamese, American Sign Language, Italian, and increasingly Arabic, Korean, and Russian. In Columbus, Somali is probably the second most spoken language.

***This entry is cross-posted from DeafGeographies.weebly.com on 05/07/2011. Please visit that website for more information.***

by Austin Kocher

I was reminded last night of an important reason why I believe this Deaf geography group is important.

I went to a Deaf mingle last night here in Columbus, Ohio for the first time in a few months. It was satisfying to catch up with old friends and to be social again. I am always amazed by the ability of such a simple event to create a Deaf space on a Friday night in the middle of an otherwise hearing pub. Beginning signers huddled together at tables hoping someone would come by ask them their name. (YOUR NAME, WHAT?) Eager interpreting students flock to fluent signers for a much-needed immersion experience. Deaf teachers and professionals enjoy a beer and full-on conversation after a week of working in hearing offices. Many people will live their whole lives in Columbus and overlook the rich spaces of Deaf cultural that coalesce and dissolve rhythmically each week across the city.

At the mingle, I met an interpreting student who was both excited and concerned about becoming an interpreter. She was excited about learning a specialized, socially relevant, cognitively demanding skill that provided communication access to Deaf and hearing relationships. But she was understandably concerned about being in a position where, as a communication facilitator, she would always be re-presenting other people's ideas and not her own. Being an interpreter entails both empowering others through communication and losing one's own ability to be recognized as a full and valued participant. It is a contradiction that interpreters regularly acknowledge and do their best to mitigate in their careers. Some interpreters move on to coordinator positions or find opportunities to teach or present workshops, while others mix interpreting with another hobby or professional skill. It can even be the source of vicarious trauma when interpreting in crisis-oriented environments or when witnessing repeated discrimination. Some leave the field completely and never look back.

Brenda Brueggemann at The Ohio State University writes about "inbetweenity" as a way of navigating the boundaries of identity which are practically fraught with everyday feelings of un-belonging. This can also happen to geography graduate students - like several of us on this site - who regularly have to give an account to our peers that, yes, sign language is a real language and, no, we are not spending our time 'volunteering for the disabled'. On the other hand, we must also give an account to fellow interpreters, Deaf friends and family members, and former workmates about what geography is, the relevance of geography to Deaf studies, and to somehow argue for ourselves that what we do is valuable for interpreting and the Deaf community.

When I was at the AAG in Seattle with the presenters (listed here), I was enormously pleased - as indeed we all were - to not have to start from scratch with each other. We mostly all knew sign language and had years of experience with the Deaf community, albeit in different capacities. We were, therefore, able to make real progress in thinking through the concept of Deaf/DEAF/deaf space and Deaf geographies. One reason (among many) that makes this project important to me, is that it provides us with a community of colleagues who can engage in real discussion about important questions. For me, it gives me an opportunity that I don't have as an interpreter: to make a contribution to the fields of interpreting and Deaf studies through my own signs/voice. 

As this grows, there will always be a need to carefully and respectfully articulate the diverse experience of people who are deaf, Deaf, DEAF, or any other identity we wish to claim for ourselves. We must be willing to address the basic misconceptions that people have about geography and about what it means to be Deaf - just as many of us once held those misconceptions, too. It is nonetheless important to have a place where we can do the work we seek to do in a community of colleagues. I hope that we can create such a place through this project, and that more will join us and challenge us through meaningful discussion in coming years.

Grades cause anxiety in universities – for teachers as much as for students. 

While there are occasional mavericks who try to get by without grades, I think grading is necessary and even quite useful. One possible suggestion is to think differently about grading. Currently, grade reports and summaries are a dry list of absolute scores with little useful information about how to improve or how past performance connects to course goals and objectives. Thomas Goetz' TED talk below has provocative implications for grading within the university. 

Now, I know that this model depends upon Bell curves, uniformity, standardized curriculum design and so on. There is a governmentality piece of this which we shouldn't accept wholesale. But I claim that it certainly isn't worse than what we are doing now.