Reading suggestion
I came across a blog that was new to me, all about information graphics with a Euro-slant, though the New York Times is still well-represented. The writer is Chiqui Estaban out of Madrid and somewhat heroically, he posts in English and Castellano. If you can read Spanish, I recommend that version because the English isn’t perfect. But then again, if you are reading this blog, you understand the value of a good image to communicate clearly, so hopefully you can look beyond a few errors in grammar.
Digressive Thought About English on the Interwebs
The fact that Sr. Esteban publishes in not only his native language but also in English makes me wonder if it is time for one of the contexts blogs to start a discussion about the primacy of English online. It’s harder to detect if English is your native tongue, but in other places, making a website requires knowing another language, hiring a translator, or using google translate (or Yahoo!s Babel Fish, etc.). And for a blog that is posted everyday, that is tedious (and therefore, may not happen). There is a much larger conversation here. English speakers have hidden privileges online (borrowing and repurposing that term from Lipsitz) that make their e-productions more international than they likely know.
References
Esteban, Chiqui. Infographic News.
Lipsitz, George. (1998) “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness”. Temple University Press.
Comments 4
Benjamin Geer — July 23, 2010
I would love to see a sociological discussion about about the primacy of European languages, particularly English, online. I think this could be a very interesting discussion about language as cultural capital in a global environment, and the relationship between language barriers and knowledge production.
Perhaps a good place to begin this discussion would be to consider the state of social science in different parts of the world, by looking at the UNESCO World Social Science Report.
For example, there is a shortage of online material about social science in Arabic, for reasons discussed in the report. Because of this, although my native language is English, for the past year I've been writing a social science blog in Arabic, in which I summarise recent research published in social science journals in English and French.
Halfjill — July 26, 2010
I also think a discussion about the sometimes almost exclusive use of English should be held in the social science (and actually aswell in all the other sciences aswell). Just wanted to note that it is not a online-only problem, but this online problem rather resolves from the use of English in the sciences.
English is not my mother tongue (how you may already have guessed due to my writing, which includes a whole bunch of mistakes, I am sure). I come from Germany and I am doing my Master degree in Berlin. It is required that we are fluent in English and we are rather surprised when we get a German scientific text presented. Up from the first semester we are told if we want to get more into academical stuff we would have to write in English aswell, otherwise it is totally senseless.
I am not against writing/discussing/publishing in English. I totally enjoy to have the chance to read texts written from people from different parts of the world. And I know I can only do so for they all publish in English. But I argue, that there should be much more awareness. The use of only English excludes a lot of people and it certainly treats English mother tongue speakers preferentially. They are much more likely to be able to express their thoughts and publish them in a way a lot of people may understand. Also the focus on English drives to "discours ignoring" (i.e. the "postcolonial" discours held in the anglophone world is only now recognized a bit more in Latin American discourses, and the anglophone discourse vice versa ignored the Latin American almost as a whole).
I have no solution by now. But I think a lot more translation work should be done in both ways: translating English written stuff into as many languages as possible and but also the other way around and of course the many different languages into many other different languages.
@ Benjamin Geer: I so totally adore your efforts! Unfortunatly I don't understand a word, but I think it is a step into the right direction - to make discourses available.
mrtn — July 28, 2010
"English speakers have hidden privileges online (borrowing and repurposing that term from Lipsitz) that make their e-productions more international than they likely know"
English speakers have hidden privileges not only on-line, but also in real life. In Academia, if you write in an others languages, your articles are simply ignored. All the academic journals with a high impact factor are in English.
In continental Europe, students are forced to learn in English. And it's not fair try to compete with people whose main language is English. That's simply imperialism. Or maybe I'm too Marxist?
Another Test Aside. This time by Uggums. » The Editors' Desk — July 30, 2010
[...] object.attachButton(element); Laura Norén at Graphic Sociology points us towards Infographic News. We tend to treat the graphical representations of our data as an afterthought [...]