Geosemiotics as envisioned by Scollon and Scollon, includes three interconnected fields of inquiry: social interaction orders, visual semiotics and place semiotics. The interaction order is a concept borrowed from Erving Goffman’s studies of behavior in public spaces (See The Presentation; “Behavior in Public Places”; Relations in Public). These classic works in nonverbal communication provide a social spine for the study of geosemiotics, which assumes that places are characterized by the social interactions that take place therein. Additionally, by observing behavior in place relating to sense of time, perceptual spaces, interpersonal distances, and personal fronts, the geosemiotician can establish a sense of how signs will be read by people in the space, and how certain behaviors will operate as indexical signs for other actors in the space. The next phase of analysis in a typical geosemiotic study takes into account the visual semiotics of images that index the “world in which they are placed” and “how social actors index these images which are so abundant” (Scollon & Scollon, p. 84). Finally, in terms of place semiotics, the place itself, whether built up or wild, must be analyzed for the qualities that interact with the social and visual signage that are in constant dialogue.
Geosemiotics, as you can see here, is preoccupied with the indexable world. Whereas, symbolic meaning definitively exceeds the resources available in the physical scene, indexical meaning resides firmly in the interaction of signifying elements; the pointing to or away from, the positioning over and above, the depiction of the local or otherwise. This principle of indexicality opens up the potential for multiple readings of the Obama Hope image as its meaning is not stable across different landscapes and communities. Furthermore, the meaning of Obama Hope does not reside in the image but in the interaction between it and the signs that surround it, whether in the form of localizable social interaction orders, and/or other images in the landscape. This principle—termed dialogicity by Scollon and Scollon—is defined simply as the assumption that “all signs operate in aggregate” (p. 205). The authors suggest that there is a double meaning to dialogicity: that the sign, when placed, references a specific discourse that informs that placement, but once placed, the sign interacts with other discourses in the forms of interaction orders and other place-based signage. In other words, dialogicity ensures that the sign, once out in the world, is no longer under the sole semiotic sovereignty of the placer. That sign is now part of an ecology of signs.
In this spirit of geosemiotic inquiry, Bick and Chiper analyze how the Nike swoosh symbol is taken up in the different contexts of Romania and Haiti. The authors conduct their comparative study after spending time in each location on ethnographic immersions in the tradition of cultural anthropology. Resonances with our project are found in their approach to the semiotics of their places as typified by their fringe status on the edges of Western capitalism. Bick and Chiper suggest that the Nike swoosh in the outer reaches of the American empire, is a sign that offers a u-topic break from the everyday life of local concerns. The authors even argue that because the Nike swoosh is available to all in Haiti and Romania, its logic as a purveyor of capitalism is undermined. A sort of defiant joy in the production and consumption of the symbol exists completely aside from its totemic status as a signifier of the mega corporation. As such, we follow in the spirit of Bick and Chiper when we look for meanings that are emplaced and unanticipated by the designs of Shepard Fairey. Yet whereas Bick and Chiper based their claims on extended periods of ethnographic immersion in Haiti and Romania, we produce our claims by navigating the virtual spaces of Google Maps, Google Street View, and related geotagged visual artifacts.
In experimenting with virtual geosemiotics, we are not suggesting that virtual methods are more favorable for conducting ethnographic fieldwork, but we do argue that they deserve serious examination as an increasingly common way of experiencing spaces from afar. In acknowledging the staccato rhythms of Street View image updates and geotagged images online, we also acknowledge that our method is not ethnographic in any traditional sense. Our methodological commitment is not a faithful representation of the community’s intentions—rather, we analyze the online image as a prism through which we can see our object of interest circulate into place and gain new characteristics. The resulting distance—rather than being a hindrance to faithful research—facilitates a critical judgment of an image’s circulation and context-dependent meanings.
Virtual geosemiotics is a research method that uses geo-spatial technologies to locate and study images that take on context-dependent meanings in specific locales across the globe. In terms of our research process, we initially scoured Gries’s Obama Hope image data set to select geographically and content-diverse murals for our case studies. With over 1000 images in the data set and over a dozen murals, our choices were not meant to be exhaustive or even representative of the archive, but rather serve as case studies to illustrate how virtual geosemiotics might help expand our knowledge of the local, indexable, visual world and Obama Hope’s place in it. Broadly, we used geo-spatial technologies (GST) such as Google Earth and Google Maps, web searches of various media coverage, and reverse images searches to gain a comprehensive, virtual view of our selected Obama Hope murals in their original place. Using GST, particularly the street view on Google Maps, we were able to locate the exact coordinates of both murals. This technology also allowed us to explore the area, neighborhood and town to help contextualize the ecology of local signs.
The following emplaced images are both remixes of Obama Hope composed in the medium of paint. Obama-Berlusconi-Progress-Process is a mural painted directly on to a wall in Orgosolo, Sardinia. Obama What Now? is a mural painted onto a movable frame and displayed on the side of the Southern Sting Tattoo Shop in Larose, Louisiana whereas Obama-Berlusconi-Progress-Process is a mural painted directly on to a wall in Orgosolo, Sardinia. Both placements of these murals are suggestive of the tensions between the political periphery and center in the national context of the United States and in the terms of the Italian state governing Sardinia from the mainland. The images and their geophysical placement offer scholars doing digital visual studies opportunities to examine the differing intonations and political valences that emerge as an image circulates and undergoes remix.
In the course of investigating Larose and Orgosolo, we found a shifting semiotic aggregate, or concentration of localized meaning, the more we probed links in the data. The videos that accompany this chapter show how extended time spent navigating Google Street View reveals new indexical relations in the case of Orgosolo. And furthermore, Instagram became an invaluable resource when exposing the contradictory and sometimes troubling images emanating from the Southern Sting Tattoo Shop in Larose. Although images are always fragmentary and selective, the digital cuttings that we amassed during this investigative work were all glimpses—rather than immersions—of signifying ecologies. The accompanying videos show viewers how our research strategies unfold by using screen capture to put the viewer in the position of the virtual geosemiotic researcher. The medium of video is better able to capture these procedures that although are replicable, would be augmented depending on the online content available for a given case.
The work of contextualizing an appearance of Obama Hope relies on the critic divining indexical links between images that are discovered in the online representational space. Indexical links also exist in the form geotags either using Google Maps or other platforms such as Instagram. Indexicality exists then in both the world rendered indexable by visual linking work of critics, and the virtual world that has been doing indexing work in the form of imagery that is indexed by the data rich practice of geotagging. We believe that this virtual method offer a productive opportunity for digital visual scholars, particularly those interested in emplacement, to study more signs within local semiotic ecologies.
In this study we advocate for the use of virtual methods as a starting point for investigations that would otherwise call for in situ field work. In rhetorical field methods writ large, techniques range from interviewing key persons, observing action in the scene, photographing, writing extensive fieldnotes, using the critic’s body as a mediator of the physical environment and as a recording device for logging affective experiences. One could characterize studies in their commitments to (a): a community, as with studies that resemble ethnographies complete with in situ interviews that examine the interpretations of people (Na’puti; Pezzullo); (b): a commitment to space and its affective properties: these studies may not include any interviews or any interpretations other than the critic’s, but they do attend to the materialities immanent to the scene in a direct fashion (Blair; Dickinson); and (c), virtual methods that seek to discover the affordances of digital techniques for the researcher. The commitment in virtual methods is not to a community or a material space, but a new space of representations that comprise a seemingly real, photographic world, and yet still offer up a particular way of seeing environments.
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