Attitudes and Gazes from Graffiti

Valentina Tretti-Beckles; Adrián Vergara-Heidke

doi:10.48619/indigo.v0i0.983

Valentina Tretti-Beckles Faculty of Human Sciences, University Potsdam, 14476, Germany
Adrián Vergara-Heidke Faculty of Letters, University of Costa Rica, 11501-2060, Costa Rica

DOI: https://doi.org/10.48619/indigo.v0i0.983

Keywords: Appraisal, Attitudes, Eye tracking, Gazes, Graffiti

Abstract

Place-making is the process of building a ‘place’ through relationships, practices, and representations of meanings of a varied nature and with the participation of different actors. These actors play different roles as neighbours, producers, recipients, passersby and visitors. Place-making includes all these actors in their relationship with that ‘place’ and in their interrelationships, practices and in the processes of construction of meaning. Within the stimuli from which people build a sense of a place are the semiotic products that are on the street, for example, commercial signs, advertising, graffiti and urban art. In 2018, we began a project to archive and analyse the semiotic landscape of neighbourhoods in Costa Rica and Chile. Based on this work, two specific aspects caught our attention: people’s attitudes and semiotic competence regarding graffiti and street art. We understand semiotic attitudes as an evaluative mental disposition towards the representation of a semiotic object, particularly tags, throw-ups and pieces. This evaluative mental disposition can guide the acts and reactions of people towards those objects and spaces. Semiotic competence is conceptualised as the ability to produce and understand different semiotic products. In the case of this work, we focus on the gaze of throw-ups and the recognition of graphemes. For this paper, we present the preliminary results of two specific objectives of the research that we are developing: first, determining the semiotic attitudes of international and Costa Rican people regarding tags and throw-ups; second, identifying the reading routes and the recognition of graphemes in pieces in people outside the environment of graffiti and hip-hop culture. For the first objective, focus groups were held in Costa Rica with Costa Ricans and Germany with individuals of different nationalities. These focus groups were transcribed and analysed using the appraisal theory of linguistics. For the second objective, an eye tracker experiment was designed to record eye movements and responses regarding the graphemes of the graffiti. The partial results show people’s negative attitudes towards tags and throw-ups, as well as different reading patterns in the eye tracker between those who identified graphemes and those who did not.

Author Biographies

Valentina Tretti-Beckles, Faculty of Human Sciences, University Potsdam, 14476, Germany

Valentina Tretti-Beckles is currently a student in the Master’s Cognitive Systems: Language, Learning and Reasoning at Potsdam University. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Spanish Philology with an emphasis in Linguistics from the University of Costa Rica in 2020. She is also interested in other disciplines of study; for this reason, she has studied anthropology, computer engineering, and teaching. She has collaborated in research projects on indigenous languages, electoral processes, cognitive processes and perception of the semiotic landscape. Valentina is interested in pragmatics, discourse studies, natural language processing, and embodiment, among others. She has published on discourtesy and valuation in electoral processes. In the past years, she has participated in the project “Linguistic landscape of urban neighbourhoods and its perception in people”, which focuses on studying people’s perception of urban neighbourhoods, including graffiti.

Adrián Vergara-Heidke, Faculty of Letters, University of Costa Rica, 11501-2060, Costa Rica

Adrián Vergara-Heidke is a full Professor in the School of Philology, Linguistics and Literature at the University of Costa Rica. He received his Master’s and PhD in Linguistics from the Pontificia Catholic University of Chile and the University of Bremen (Germany), respectively. He has developed collaborative research projects at two Research Institutes from the University of Costa Rica (CIEP and CICOM). Adrián has held different administrative positions at the University of Costa Rica; currently, he is the director of the PhD in Society and Cultural Studies and the representative of the Arts and Literature Area in the SEP Council. His areas of expertise are text linguistics, pragmatics, discourse studies (i.e., multimodal texts, media, political and digital communication) and forensic linguistics. In the past years, he has participated in the project “Linguistic landscape of urban neighbourhoods and its perception in people”, which focuses on studying people’s perception of urban neighbourhoods, including graffiti.