Transcriber: Thomas Horejes Reviewer: Denise RQ
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[This interpretation has not been reviewed by the presenter.]
Hello.
Welcome to all, welcome here to Gallaudet.
I'm delighted to be here
and very excited from the presentations this morning,
but I have to say they made me more than a little nervous.
And you know, one of the things that's very nerve wracking about this
is when the nerves hit you, you feel it mostly in your back.
You sometimes have to shake it off.
That's perfect.
That tension that I'm holding in my back
is right in line with my topic.
I'm talking about DeafSpace and insights gained
from an understanding of DeafSpace and from dorsality.
From the time of Stokoe,
we started learning about deaf experience and deaf language
and the visual nature of our language,
and many research findings have come forth from that.
But what I propose is that we advance this further, to the next level.
So we are examining not just the sighted, visual experience we have
but also the dorsal experience.
The experience of the world behind us where we cannot see.
If you see the image on the screen before you,
you see birds all lined up on a wire, all perfectly equidistant from each other?
This image, actually, has something to do with how we innately measure ourselves,
so birds on this wire are all lined up about three inches from each other.
But, in taking this objective measure from our point of view, we're attributing
something to the birds that isn't innate to them.
Inches are not a measure that's innate to them.
They are measuring using their given bodies and given experiences.
I want to share two stories from my childhood
that come to bear on this.
The other picture that you see is the farmhouse that I was raised on,
and the view from my dinner table.
Looking out my window, I could see my father at work all around the farm.
And there was a laneway, a driveway,
just across the wooded area behind the barn that I couldn't see.
There were trees blocking the way,
though there was a telephone line that did peek just above the trees.
My mom who is hearing, would, from time to time, tell me,
"Hey, we've got a visitor coming down the road.
Go put on a clean shirt."
I would be surprised, and not knowing the visitor was coming,
and see them sure enough a few minutes later coming.
One day, I warned my mom.
Hey, we've got visitors coming.
She couldn't hear any visitors coming.
She walked to the window, and sure enough here came the visitor.
I knew that, because I saw the birds lined up on the wire.
And the visual cue I had was all the birds taking flight at once from that wire.
I knew that was because someone was coming down the road I couldn't see.
At 7-years-old, I knew this simply from observation,
I knew innately how to infer what was happening.
I had a number of cues, but these cues weren't really visual.
They come from a dorsal experience I have as a deaf person.
Dorsality.
Let's back up for a moment.
And look at the meaning of the word "dorsal."
The dorsal fin of a shark.
The dorsal side of anything is the rear of it.
In architecture, the facade is ornate on a building,
but the dorsal side is usually far less so.
Dorsal experiences are given less value
and often attributed a negative value in our society.
But if you take the imagined rock in our path,
we only see one side of it.
If we were to lift it and see its dorsal side,
we might see a world teeming with life underneath that rock.
The quote that you see here comes
from a famous architect, and says in sum,
that there is nothing about people,
nothing about humanity that is innately measurable.
We, however, come up with a means of measure.
A yard stick, a calendar,
a string of words set up consecutively.
These are all means of expressing ourselves.
My job with working with DeafSpace design research
is to look at the decisions we make in architecture,
but back that up to see
how we quantify and examine and inhabit space.
In one situation, for example,
painting of the background of a classroom might be seen as important,
but the measure of width that we paint
the color for contrast with the presenter
will vary from a hearing to a deaf community.
A hearing architect would think about having a decent swath.
But the deaf eye is going to look at the perspective
of the student and the teacher in the classroom.
Is the teacher being observed from 5 feet away or 20 feet?
We would need the contrast to go much higher
because of the visual sight lines we're attuned to.
A number of areas of research have brought this to mind.
Another is the width of sidewalks.
The standard width of sidewalks
does not engage the space of deaf people
engaging in a conversation.
Oftentimes, one has to walk off the curb.
So I began to collect data to help me understand
how to create a formula that we could apply
for a more appropriate width to sidewalks and walking spaces.
The research found a wealth of data.
Much of that can be found
in the Deaf Studies digital journals.
But one that was striking to me, and you'll see in this video,
people walking down a hallway
and avoiding something in their path.
I want you to see how they do so.
So you see this conversational dyad,
maneuvering around this obstacle with no problem at all.
It's striking.
But it's a story we often see told in the deaf world.
One conversational participant is responsible
for observing obstacles for the other.
If you haven't warned me,
as a conversational participant in the deaf world,
I would be upset that you haven't.
But they navigate this without cues.
What is happening?
We don't see them divert their eye gaze and then reroute.
Let's take a deeper look at this.
After a great deal of study,
how humans view the world, how we assess the world,
I would agree that we do use peripheral vision.
We have a 180-degree field,
but we are very selective
in how we apply our attention to our visual field.
Basically, it's widely agreed upon
that deaf people do not in fact see with greater acuity
nor do we see a wider span of peripheral vision,
however, we attend to that visual space and peripheral field
more than do hearing people.
So we see differently, not better.
But one thing that I had struggled with, though,
is looking at how we select what we attend to
in a different way than others do.
So hearing conversational participants, for example,
can hear from a 360-degree field around them.
They're getting information about the world
that is overlaid on their 180-degree visual field
from this auditory channel.
So anything that is happening in their dorsal experience
can be inferred from the auditory cues that they get.
So in these research findings,
we then wanted to look at deaf people.
Yes, deaf people are visual people.
but that doesn't explain what causes these adaptations visually.
So we generally accept that they are deaf
and that is innately what's happening and nothing else.
We give no attention to the dorsal experience.
It's not counted, measured, or quantified.
So this really begs us to explain in greater detail
how at 6 years old, I inferred the meaning
given from the flight of the crows.
How did I do this without explicit instruction?
And what about my dorsal experience gives this notion to me?
So in DeafSpace, we're looking at a number of different factors
to help us in design.
But I found a few that I can share with you today in brief.
In DeafSpace, we look at how deaf people occupy a space
such as a restaurant or a classroom.
In a restaurant, if I'm the first to get there,
I'm most likely to sit with my back to the wall
so I have control of what enters my visual field.
I would not sit with my back to the bulk of the restaurant.
I would reduce these stressors by controlling my dorsal experience.
So if somebody else is there,
I would be willing to sit in a different space.
The picture that you see on the screen, depicts a forward-looking picture
that shows the shadow of an object behind us.
So we are using cues from our dorsal experience
to infer what's happening.
This picture clearly shows that there is a street light just behind me.
The street light itself is not in my visual field.
So when we encounter each other.
When two of us are in a dyad,
we have an effect on our dorsal experience.
The conversational partner is given a sense of trust by his partner
to notify each other of experiences in their dorsal field.
In this film, you see people walking backwards.
And the camera view is unusual because in looking
at the deaf experience and the deaf community,
if people want to experience what it's like to be deaf
they very often will plug their ears.
Well the absence of sound doesn't give you that experience of being deaf.
I say leave that behind.
This kind of video experience that you saw walking backwards
and navigating in space is much better.
Because when you're walking forward,
your eyes can use the sensory reach to see the columns or whatever
to see that you're walking straight.
That's also true when you're walking backwards.
You use the surrounding environment to infer your dorsal world.
This is an embedded experience throughout deaf lives.
What I would propose to you is
that examining your visual experience is great.
But it's also mapped onto what gives us meaning
in terms of the space behind us.
And our dorsal experience.
We usually stop at looking at that person being deaf
as though that explains everything.
But what role then does dorsality give us
in understanding the deaf person's epistemological interpretation
of the world around them and how is that embedded
in our research framework with our experimental methodologies
with the ways in which we are examining
deaf people and their dorsality?
I talked about how we manage our dorsal experience when we're alone,
but if we look at a dyad of deaf people...
when they look at each other,
the intersection of their eye gaze extends this sensory reach.
We are then able to extend sensory reach
for the other conversational partner's dorsal experience.
I am now responsible for my partner's dorsal world
in informing them of any cues and any significant changes in that.
And they in turn are doing the same for me through that dyadic interchange.
In this next video, you see Dr. Ben Bahan
and his Deaf Studies Digital Journal
has looked at Italian experiences in Italy
and out in public and looking at underlying similarities
in their use of conversational eye gaze.
And you would see in this Italian pair of deaf people,
the same kinds of cues and warnings for the dorsal experience
and something coming along in their field.
For example, a car that they might run into briefly.
Without turning and explicitly looking at the car,
very slight visual information was taken and shared with the person
to extend their sensory reach to their own dorsal field.
So this aspect of dorsality asks us to look at further tools
we can use to understand the visual experience.
We have eye tracking software and GoPro cameras,
but how can we begin to measure and quantify the dorsal experience?
I looked at different conversational dyads,
some hearing, some deaf, wear GoPro head-mounted cameras
and asked them to walk along H street, crossing the medians and so forth
and converse while doing so.
So I looked at the hearing dyads who engaged in spoken language
and then I analyzed the video tapes
for a moment when their visual field extended both forward,
non-intersecting, compared that with how often
the visual fields did intersect with each other.
So you see the two dyads there representing the data feed.
The green lines show points of intersection
where their visual fields intersected and degrees of intersection.
I'm not prepared to show you all the data yet.
But the deaf dyads had much greater intersection
and greater duration of intersection of visual field
than anybody else.
A whole host of questions is begged from this finding.
One of those is that of expression.
As we are navigating a space and using expression,
I am in some ways giving my new expressions
that you can interpret to get cues about your dorsal experience.
And we do this for each other, in turn, serially,
as we walk along and engage in conversation.
Now the video that saw here, the green there indicates
where eye gaze of both was consistent
in looking directly at each other.
And then you can also see an indication in the data on your screen
showing when intersection
showing when intersection happened consecutively but not simultaneously.
And then you can also see some data in the hearing pair
where they intersected very little.
So if all of the conversation were only consecutively intersecting,
then the data should show that.
But what we saw was for more than half of the conversational space,
when two deaf people were engaged in conversation,
the one who was actively signing was not looking away
from their conversational pair and still conversing,
they were in fact looking at each other.
So I do in fact have to engage
in some kind of intersection of eye gaze with my partner.
And some of that is
because of the dorsality of our experience.
I am engaging in intersecting eye gazing with them,
so they can warn me
of whatever is happening in my dorsal experience.
And honestly, if they fail to give me those warnings,
I would just tell them you walk on ahead,
we'll have our conversation when we get there.
It's a really hard and fast requirement of a pair using sign language.
This experience of dorsality begs for more research,
and there's a great deal of potential with it.
For example, if you look at
how deaf children are taught and educated,
we have looked at cognition,
we have looked at language and many of these things.
But we have to perhaps look at how we've interpreted that historically.
But the fact is there are a great many more cues
that we have for human experience and human being than have been told.
With that, I want to thank all of you for watching me
and watching my back
throughout this whole presentation.
Thank you very much.