#RC21 Viola Wiegand: Concordancing the signage of surveillant landscapes

Join us for the RC21 Project Symposium, where invited speakers and project team members will present their work on methodology and applications of concordance analysis!

Viola Wiegand: »Concordancing the signage of surveillant landscapes«

Abstract:

Surveillant practices are widespread in modern life, and while they are often based on digital technologies, some can be visible in physical environments, especially in cities. From a linguistic perspective, examining patterns of surveillance discourses not just in monomodal text but also in multimodal sources can contribute to our understanding of meaning in society. In this talk, I focus on textual patterns that point to surveillant practices operating in urban environments. I introduce an innovative method of corpus compilation based on multimodal data: photographs from the “Signs of Surveillance” art project (Buzzo, 2020) are processed with automatic text extraction. This procedure enables me to then concordance the physical signage that informs passers-by about surveillant practices operating in urban areas. For the concordance analysis, I adopt the sociolinguistic framework of ‘surveillant landscapes’ (Jones, 2017). I argue that a corpus linguistic approach is particularly suited to identifying textual patterns across a range of surveillant landscapes. Common patterns such as CCTV in operation and images are being monitored particularly highlight the role of urban video surveillance. In addition, the talk will demonstrate that concordancing the signage of surveillant landscapes can also reveal textual evidence which offers insights into power relations.

References:

Buzzo, D. (2020). Signs of surveillance. In R. Earnshaw, S. Liggett, P. Excell, & D. Thalmann (Eds.), Technology, Design and the Arts—Opportunities and Challenges (pp. 159–181). Springer.

Jones, R. H. (2017). Surveillant landscapes. Linguistic Landscape, 3(2), 150–187.