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Geometrical Touch: Drawing an Occasioned Map on the Hand

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Abstract

In this paper, based on video recordings of Orientation and Mobility (O&M) lessons for visually-disabled students, I will examine how occasioned maps (Psathas, 1979; Garfinkel, 2002), drawn in the student’s palm are interactionally traced, felt, and noticed in order to represent the shape of a crossing for all practical purposes. Touching will be examined from the perspective of the live production of "trails" on a specific region of the body, the palm of the hand. We will begin to question how such hand-drawing map episodes occur during O&M courses, stressing how the coparticipants establish a participation framework that facilitates the making of the drawing, hand-map drawings are based on lines that are neither evanescent nor permanent. Their “persistence” is not an intrinsic feature but a systematic multimodal accomplishment. We will show how the drawn lines become depictions of the streets and contribute to producing two contrasting geometrical representations of the layout of a junction.

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Notes

  1. More recently, a few blindness-aware navigation apps have been developed, which "announce the distance to and the name of a cross street as you approach it". On their usability for visually-impaired persons, see May M., & LaPierre C. M., 2007.

  2. Nowadays, those tools are sometimes used in complement with electronic tools, which provide "explore route in advance," "Where Am I" or "turn by turn" functions, depending on the familiarity of the student with such technological devices. O&M training is a comprehensive and individualized instruction, utilizing a variety of techniques and technologies, including the recent assistive technologies, such as GPS devices and smartphone apps.

  3. Along with Goodwin (2003, 229) and De Stefani & Deppermann (2021), we will pay specific attention to the hybrid dimension of pointing gestures, which have deictic and iconic features, while some other gestures have vectorial characteristics and contribute to building a geometrical spatial representation.

  4. This decision was also motivated by the considerable difficulties I had to video record such episodes during lessons in the busy Parisian streets.

  5. Our understanding of reflexivity is close to Lynch & Woolgar (1988) who stressed that "the sense and import of a "pulse" on an oscillograph screen is reflexive to the local, interactionally organized, work of "extracting" the pulse from the practical contingencies of a series of observational runs (Garfinkel et al., 1981)".

  6. Goodwin (2003, 239) also pointed out that tracing “frequently requires a simultaneous formulation of what is being pointed at”.

  7. Here, "upward" and "downward" indicate different orientations on the palm of the student's hand, which is used as a referential. The "upper" part of the palm points to the finger, while the lower part is oriented to the wrist.

  8. See Goodwin (2003, 229) on the merging of deictic and iconic features of some pointing gestures.

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Acknowledgments

A grant from the MAIF Foundation supported this work. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Louis Quéré (CEMS-EHESS) for his valuable support. I am also thankful to the instructors in Orientation and Mobility, as well as their students for generously allowing me to use my video and audio equipment during their training sessions and for taking the time to answer my questions. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for providing insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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  1. Economics and Social Science Department, i3, UMR CNRS 9217, Telecom Paris, Palaiseau, France

    Marc Relieu

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Relieu, M. Geometrical Touch: Drawing an Occasioned Map on the Hand. Hum Stud 46, 757–781 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09676-4

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