The look of writing in reading. Graphetic empathy in making and perceiving graphic traces

Abstract

This article presents preliminary considerations and results from a research project designed to investigate the relation between (i) gestures, (ii) graphic traces and (iii) perceptions. More specifically, the project aims to test the hypothesis that graphic traces, including handwriting, can set up graphetic empathy between writers and readers of traces across long temporal and spatial distances. Insofar as a graphic trace is lawfully related to the gesture by which it came into being, the trace itself will hold information about the gesture, which may resonate with the sensorimotor system of a perceiver, as if they themselves performed the gesture. If this is in fact so, it will have important and hitherto unanticipated implications for our understanding of the embodiment of reading. As part of the article we will present and discuss the results of a neurophenomenological trial study through which we attempt to operationalize the gesture-trace and trace–perception relations respectively.

Introduction

When you read a handwritten letter or Christmas card from a family member or friend, does the flow of their handwriting make you feel their presence more than if their words were typed?

Our concern in this paper is with what ecological psychologist James Gibson has called “fundamental graphic acts” (Gibson & Yonas, 1967a, 1967b) that result in graphic traces. We believe the study of such graphic acts can further our understanding of the material underpinnings of the embodied experience of reading. A graphic trace is an enduring mark made on a surface by the continuous movement of a hand holding a graphic tool (Ingold, 2007, p. 43) such as a pen, a paintbrush or a stick of charcoal. Humans have made graphic traces since the Middle Stone Age (Malafouris, 2013), and these traces are believed to have profoundly shaped our cognition and the social fabric of our societies (Donald, 1991; Renfrew and Morley, 2007). They record the movements of the ‘writer’ (mark maker) which are explored by the ‘reader’ (mark perceiver) in order to respond to the experiential meaning¹ potential (Johannessen and Van Leeuwen, 2017) the graphic traces afford. In other words, our concern is with a specific kind of organism-environment system (Järvilehto, 1998) characterised by a ‘writer’, ‘reader’, and graphic trace, in which someone makes a graphic trace and someone else experiences it at a different place and time.

It should be pointed out that our concern is not what reading researchers might think of as a standard case of reading: the act of engaging with pages of typeset text, as when someone reads a novel or a research article. From the perspective of cognitive psychology, models of ‘reading’ emphasize the inter-relationships between knowledge of the purpose and pragmatics of written language, knowledge of the domain described by the text, strategies for extracting meaning, and graphonomics (Coltheart, 2006; Fitzgerald and Shanahan, 2000). The broad approach is to regard reading as a progression from visual form to phonology to meaning; albeit with some debate as to whether the progression occurs bottom-up, as this implies, or top-down (Rayner et al., 2012). While there is some acknowledgement that the visual appearance of words (their ‘envelope’) can support reading, this has been controversial and depends on which features one uses for defining the envelope (Beech and Mayall, 2005), and there is less interest in the relationship between letter formation and reading. Our focus is on how the visual form of a handwritten word or letter carries the movements of its formation and how this impacts on reading.

What makes reading an embodied act is its being based on the physical action of making marks. One should not simply think about writing and reading as if all instances of each comprise the same kind of codified externalization and subsequent internalisations of mental symbols. Rather, the production and interpretation of handmade graphic traces involves profoundly embodied activity. Preliminary findings from cognitive neuroscience indicate a difference in our sensory-kinetic systems between seeing handwritten and printed letterforms (Longcamp et al., 2005, 2006, 2008, 2011; Wamain et al., 2012). Longcamp and her team conclude that “even if the [production of a graphic trace] is not directly accessible to the observer, it is likely reconstructed dynamically on the basis of a static input” (Longcamp et al., 2011, p. 1257).

Timothy Ingold emphatically distinguishes between typing and writing as two different modalities of touch: “The hand that holds the pen does not assemble letters or words into sentences as does the hand of the typist or the type-setter. It rather lays a trail of continuous movement – the letter line –along which words make their appearance” (Ingold, 2018, p. 37). In typing, the flow of the hand is broken up, there is “no ductus of the hand, no feeling” (ibid.). Elsewhere, he writes:

In the lines left upon its surface the handwritten page bears witness to gestures that, in their qualities of attentiveness and feeling, embody an intentionality intrinsic to the movement of the production. The typewriter, however, neither attends or feels, and the marks that are made by its means bear no trace of human sensibility (2007, p. 147)

One might wonder why studying physical actions of making and perceiving single letters, as we do here, is important for a field of reading research that takes the reading of pages of typeset texts as its paradigm case. After all, are we studying the same kind of reading as those who study how people engage with the words on the page?

Consider the look of the type in Fig. 1, Fig. 2 (Fig. 1 shows a photo taken of a page from the Danish children's book, Mimbo Jimbo visits a friend, and Fig. 2 shows a photo of a translation into Danish from one of the Peppa Pig books). We find it safe to assume that these are commonplace examples of the kinds of texts we use to introduce children to reading. Note that these are typeset texts, not handwritten, and notice also that the typefaces (or computer fonts) have been deliberately designed to look as if they were in fact written by hand. There is an irregularity to them, and their shapes are distressed in a way that conveys … something. They do not really look like the result of the immature hand-eye coordination of a child's early writing but rather they look like type drawn by an adult while attempting to reproduce the look and feel of children's writing. They beg the question: insofar as these irregular typefaces introduce variability into letter shapes, which may unnecessarily increase the cognitive load on the child (Perea et al., 2016; Barnhart and Goldinger, 2010) and so be pedagogically undesirable when teaching very young learners to read, why is there a market for them? What is it that so urgently needs to be expressed that designers create such typefaces and that people buy them and use them for children's books? This article suggests they have another kind of value that maybe has little to do with experiencing written content and everything to do with the affectual, interpersonal, identity-laden, kinaesthetically embodied aspect of writing and reading. This type attempts to address the reading child and say, “I am speaking to you in a voice you can recognize in your own voice”.

We have included these examples because they juxtapose handwriting and typography, thus allowing us to provide a little context and draw a few necessary distinctions. Our article is mainly about traces of manual gestures and these would seem to be lost in many examples of typography, even if the Mimbo Jimbo and Peppa Pig examples synthesize them. Yet many typefaces, like Times New Roman, that appear to abstract away from their material origins in writing, retain the distribution of thick and thin in their strokes from that of the broad pen. Thus, we argue, even in studying many cases of adult reading there are cues about the material beginnings of writing and reading embedded in the graphic invariants of the letters’ looks.

Returning to the matter at hand, the experiential basis of writing and reading in manual gestures (not typography), in section 2 we explain our fundamental proposal, that handmade graphic traces retain the prosodic structure of the manual gestures that produce them and that readers anticipate and are sensitive to that prosody, and spell out our conceptual grounds in James Gibson's ideas about fundamental graphic acts (FGAs). Section 3 describes the state of the art in literature that deals with this relationship. Section 4 lays out the multidisciplinary approach used in our work, and section 5 describes two preliminary studies to explore how we have, and further might, operationalise our ideas. The outcomes hint at the possibility of graphetic empathy and encourage further investigation. Section 6 discusses and concludes.