Michal Wanke, University of Opole, Poland
Keywords
typography, identity, cultures, social space, languages
Abstract
The aim of this project is to understand the diversity of experience of those using native non-Latin typefaces (and alphabets) in daily digital interactions and switching from the native script to the Latin, emoji typeface, or other language representations in relation to the user’s identity. The study encompasses the experiences of the users of Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian or Tamil scripts who also use English, or another language in the Latin script, as a parallel means of communication. The paper seeks to analyze how cultural identities are embedded in and enabled by the use of the medium of the alphabet. This focus expands upon the existing body of research about alphabets in the fields of art theory and history, such as from the phenomenological perspective (Drucker 1994) or its rhetorical affordances (Brumberger 2003). Prior research has primarily focused on the symbolic representations of language, for instance in public spaces (Wachendorff, 2016), with the concept of linguistic landscapes being one of the most studied (Shohamy & Gorter 2008, Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, Hasan Amara, Trumper-Hecht 2006).This paper seeks to link the structural approaches to the graphical representations of text encoded in different alphabets and fonts to social or cultural practices on the micro-level. It argues that this specific space of texts, especially in the era of textually-mediated digital communication and the networked revolution (Raine, Wellman 2012), creates a ‘layer’ of social space and can be approached as such. A specific adjustment of Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) theory of the production of space and the humanist materialism is applied to communication practices (Fuchs 2019) in order to study the overlooked, somewhat transparent realm of typefaces. It involves analysis of practices of the use of fonts, representations of the identities via fonts and representational fonts.A range of qualitative and arts-based methods was applied, including in-depth interviewing and digital-ethnographic inquiry as well as creative workshops with international students of the University of Opole and partner universities in Europe and Asia in order to explore different experiences, practices, and assumptions about graphic representations of languages. The strategic choice of font in relation to identity is explored as well as the construction and deconstruction of identity with typographic use (both in reading and writing). The practice of transitioning between languages and alphabets, like transliteration and transcription, is also explored in relation to the transformation of identity. Also, the reification of cultures, both in an active and passive way, is analyzed as a production of social space.
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