Storyworld evoked by hand-drawn maps

Abstract

This article-as-narrative tells a story about the creation and interpretation of story space through hand-drawn maps and narration. The focus of the narrative is on video-recorded storytelling during a coffee-table encounter and on how it is reshaped and transformed in the process of analysing it. Attention in the analysis is paid to the maps that one of the interlocutors, an aphasic man, has drawn, and the role of multimodal and multisemiotic aspects of narration and the design of mutual understanding. We use the approach of narration-in-interaction to explore storyworlds that are anchored on the one hand in the face-to-face storytelling and on the other hand in the life histories and landscapes of the interlocutors. The article moves between different scenes (home, university and town) and shows how different places evoke different storyworlds, thereby unveiling the multiplicity of space. We show how the graphic lines (the maps) in the notebook turned out to be a success story about how mutual understanding is gained with a few words, drawn pictures, and lots of imaginative artfulness of people who face the challenges of language impairment in their everyday lives. The narrative in this article ends up pondering the connections between spatial frames, spaces of narration, and storyworlds through concepts of literal and metaphorical space.

Keywords:

• space
• aphasia
• narration-in-interaction
• storyworld
• multimodal

Acknowledgements

Both authors are equally correspondent (names cited in an alphabetic order). This study was made possible by the grants of the Academy of Finland (no. 212784 and no. 115414). The authors thank the referees and the editors for their valuable comments on the early version of this article. They are also grateful to the couple for participating in the study.

Notes

1. Aphasia is a linguistic deficit caused by brain damage. People with aphasia are not able to speak or have difficulties in speaking and/or understanding spoken language. Writing and reading may be affected and they may have difficulties with other symbolic systems (like numbers) as well (Parr et al. 1997).

2. When a person has suffered natural communication losses as in severe aphasia, augmentative and alternative communication methods serve as means of selecting and making information available to interactive interpretation processes. Different kinds of compensatory communication strategies (e.g. drawing, gestures, writing, low-technology books, information technological devices, etc.) are used to support the co-construction of meanings with the communication partners (Goodwin, 2003; Beukelman et al. 2007). Individuals with complex communication needs do manage to use different communication modes and strategies in an effective manner to perform specific communication tasks (Higginbotham et al. 2007).

3. All names used are pseudonyms. The photographs have been processed so that people and places are unrecognisable. The details of verbal utterances have also been changed when necessary.

4. Martti can be sure that, in her inference-making, Liisa will draw on the “why that now” principle (Schegloff and Sacks 1973), a fundamental question that participants – according to ethnomethodology – orient to in action.

5. During that visit to their home, other similar cases between the drawings in the notebook and the actions they indicated were presented.

6. In scientific work, thematic choices always focus on some issues and some others may be neglected as the “excluded voice thesis” postulates (see, for example, Booth and Booth 1996; Stacey and Thorne 1985).