How does the Ojibway Shell help us learn more about North American Indian Iconography?*
This article explores the use of computer technology to develop a digital directory of Ojibway icons with story board facility — called the Ojibway Shell — to enable a novice to learn how Ojibway object icons link with action icons and construct narratives in a pedagogical setting.
The Ojibway shell holds a database of icons. Ojibway icons are drawn in silhouette on skins, bark, pottery, and cave walls — either solid or shaded or in linear outline. Most are realistic — with shading and additional picture elements. Some are calligraphic in visual character.
Collectively, Ojibway icons constitute a digital lexicon of symbols and signs. Each icon in the lexicon is an unspecified nugget — an abstraction — which acts as a proxy — but with wide meaning.
Ojibway use these icons to record significant events and happenings — in spiral format. These spiral organisations combine individual icons in sequence — as charts — where every icon affects the meaning of every other icon. The choice of icons and their organisation makes each chart unique.
Each Ojibway chart is a visual representation — a holistic pattern — and enables the Ojibway to see at a glance all the salient factors — and the flow of energy around the chart. Ojibway can take it all in and weigh it all up — as a matter of course. We can’t do that so easily. Our route to interpretation must be more explicit.
Our interpretation of any chart is informed by explicit knowledge of the individual icon itself — relevant subject knowledge — and its position in the sequence. Ojibway icons interact with each other and make icon order syntactically important. Here application of basic knowledge of syntax format — pronoun or noun | verb | noun — is implicit. And the chart itself informs interpretation of context.
It seems there are implicit rules of graphical syntax which underpin our interpretation of Ojibway iconic concatenations — and enable us to grasp their meaning — without detailed knowledge of Ojibway culture or ability to see spiral meaning at a glance.
A computer is a graphical tool which enables a learner to move away from the logical, linguistic and rational — in order that we better see what is there in a spiral chart. The research reported here shows how to draw more on what we know about graphics — usually associated with the right side of the brain — to successfully interpret Ojibway iconography. In this way, Ojibway spiral concatenations provides useful insights into how Iconic communication works generally.
This is qualitative interpretation which computers can’t do. A human mind and imagination are needed for qualitative interpretation — but the shell did reveal something else at work.
pictorial narrative
Virtually everyone is familiar with the concept of story telling — and we know that a story isn’t just a collection of words on a page. A story can be told as collection of pictures. Here, animation can bring meaning alive in much the way that intonation and inflection combined with tone of voice works with words.
Ojibway read their spirals without translation into words. We can’t do that — but we can draw on knowledge of story-telling to unpack these charts (above right). And this means utilising standard left-right reading direction — rather than spiral format. Editing is easier this way.
The Ojibway chart is transformed from its centre start — spiralling anti-clockwise outwards — into a linear icon sequence (above). But when translated into words, it doesn’t read in the same way. This is explained in part by a convention — that icons are defined as non-interactive, static and invariant — in words.
This convention is clearly important for example with road signs and symbols but is not true of Ojibway icons in sequence because an icon’s position in an Ojibway string — its use — does influence interpretation and meaning. Syntax is important because changes in icon order cause changes in meaning.
animation
Animation makes the underlying semantics of particular syntactical concatenation more perspicuous (above). In the Ojibway shell, object icons are animated with the behaviour of an action — and this approach exposed a deeper complexity.
In the iconic concatenation man walk lake the action — the behaviour — is walk. It is the man icon that is animated (above centre). A click on the foot prints icon would show man move from initial position to location of lake (from left to right).
But with man hunt deer it is the arrow that moves (above left). In a pedagogical environment, a student might double-click on the icon hunt to make the arrow move from man to deer. Representing man see fish might be achieved by animating the line of sight — from eyes to fish (above right). The eye and line of sight is a picture element.
It is important to note that the arrow icon is used to indicate direction but also to show whether Ojibway are at peace or engaged in war. Here the arrow is inanimate because it operates as a sign — a metaphor — rather than as an object. Interpretation of an individual icon is subject to the context in which it operates.
With more complex iconic strings such as deer dead man walk drag teepee woman boy, both icons — deer dead and man — are animated (above, top). The Ojibway shell displays this string as a linear sequence — allowing addition of contextural icons — meat rack empty and meat rack full (above top row). Inclusion of meat rack icons at the start and end of the sequence — signals hunger as context and better aids interpretation (above; top row, rightmost).
Any shell capable of achieving intelligent iconic animation would have to include a semantic parser in order to manage and make these decisions — about which icons to show or animate.
Meanwhile, learners will continue to rely on teacher design of choreographed strings in animation — meaning the teacher-designer needs to anticipate what a learner will want to animate. Here, a learner’s choice in selecting an icon for animation may lead to drawing out by interview further insights into thinking about meaning.
Deconstructing the complexity of rain man see river fish concatenation reveals its underlying syntax — object | object | action | object | object — and meaning. The rain icon signals torrential rain which has caused the river to swell and an abundance of fish for harvesting (above, top left).
Dynamic use of different visual representations aids interpretation and is crucial in learning to interpret meaning. For example, when deconstructing the string me hunt deer dead drag teepee woman boy, our focus can switch from hunger to home — woman boy is family: wife and son (above, right).
Ojibway shell
The Ojibway shell holds a small database of icons sufficient to demonstrate the tool in a pedagogical setting — within language development and the art, media and design curriculum [*3].
There are about 100 icons in the Ojibway shell. Each icon is tagged with a short description of that icon and organised in vocabulary cards (above; left, top). These show words grouped as object words (nouns), action words (verbs) and description words (adjectives) in English. A click on a word — by means of tracker-ball or mouse — copies the text to a message box and calls the icon to the icon display panel (above; left, lower).
Point and click operations are an important way to manage text and icons — and menu control functions. These functions enable windows to be dynamic with procedures to change icon scale and icon location in the display window — to suggest priority or emphasis (above right).
An animated concatenation is built by clicking on several words — or by direct access to the Ojibway icon catalogue. This access encourages browsing — where a learner might get lucky and see something more appropriate. A button click then generates a sequence of animated frames.
Text output is lateral rather than literal because this how Ojibway icons and charts work. The message box allows cut-and paste editing — to change word order; delete words, and add words not in the vocabulary — in order to show how the iconic concatenation conforms to more traditional English sentence construction.
Novice users generally use the format object icon — action — object or: pronoun or noun — verb — noun. Examples of meaningful concatenations are: me eat deer and man walk wood. Novice users learn to construct more complex concatenations — me walk wood see river fish eat walk home (above; left, lower). Experienced users of the Ojibway shell might engage in constructing an iconic dialogue — with another student online — rather than simply comment, critique or modify a message.
The vocabulary card aids interrogation — by question — and takes the form of who — what — how — where — when — why. These tabulations correspond to object icons — WHO WHAT — action icons — HOW — and contextual icons — WHERE WHEN WHY. A click on the show icons button displays linked icons in the icon window. This makes the syntactical structure of the concatenation clearer.
Deployment of animation techniques proved useful in deconstructing the complexity of spiral charts (above; click to play). This focus on story-telling requires an interface that facilitates knowledge transfer of story-telling through animation.
conclusion
We know that interpretation of Ojibway icons in sequence relies on application of knowledge of syntax — and of context and culture — and relevant subject knowledge of individual icons.
The Ojibway shell is a powerful tool which facilitates the communication of specific subject knowledge about icons — and aids transfer of knowledge about syntax. It uses animation as a means of emulating story-telling principles — to further expose underlying meaning — without the need for translation into natural language.
This research suggests there are implicit rules of graphical syntax which underpin our interpretation of Ojibway iconic concatenations. These work alongside explicit rules governing story-telling — where a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end and includes elements of plot and suspense — to better engage students in learning about iconographic communication.
However, all these aims and procedures depend critically on a high-quality end-user interface. Future iterations of the Ojibway shell will enable a learner to tell a story in full animation — with music, special effects and audio narration.
written by popadog
* This article was first published in 1989 as part of a thesis which gained a Master of Science degree — awarded by Lancaster University, UK. The thesis title The Limits of Iconic Communication. The original part is edited here for brevity. The Ojibway shell is an interactive computer-based language transformation tool capable of linking words with images — called icons. The tool uses natural language — English.
Note — images used in this article were digitised from the original thesis manuscript. In 1989 a dot-matrix printer made the traditional typewriter obsolete. It was able to print images onto paper using an array of tiny dots. The array is configured by computer to mimic any alpha-numeric character, symbol or punctuation mark — in any language. It could reproduce screen graphics perfectly — to scale and accurate. The configured array is pushed against a section of ribbon mechanically. The black ribbon is moved forward slightly, and the next array of dots is printed. The ribbon supplies the ink. The original manuscript was printed using a dot-matrix printer.
*2 The research reported here was designed for display on a Macintosh™ computer screen and prototyped in HyperCard™. The Macintosh™ computer had in-built multimedia capabilities as standard and includes digitally scanned images — using HyperScan™ — draw, paint, and cut and paste desktop publishing and graphics creation; — animation and digitised audio and speech — MacRecorder™ and SoundEdit™ and MacinTalk™.
*3 signing-tutor; information about international sign and symbol usage including examples in variation between symbols and sign used in different context culture and countries.
