- Feb 2024
-
Local file Local file
-
Only the largepelican, squatting in the trees, can break the connection, a symbol ofbad audience, staring insolently, resolutely offstage. But she is beinggradually struck out, her colours fading as the original red and giltborders reassert themselves reprimandingly from beneath, themanuscript exacting a slow punishment for the sin of inattention.
Dennis Duncan completely misreads this image of Grosseteste and the Pelican which appears in the Lambeth Palace Library's MS 522 of The Castle of love. (for image see: https://hypothes.is/a/RzHLjsz8Ee6dZLOTV5h65Q)
Duncan identifies Grosseteste's pose with his hand raised and his index finger extended as "the classic gesture of the storyteller." In fact, the bishop is pointing directly up at the pelican which sits just on top of the frame of the illuminated scene. This pelican is elevated above and just beyond the scene of the image because it represents, as was common in the time period, the suffering of Christ.
Bestiaries of the age commonly depicted the "pelican in her piety" which was noted by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies (Book 12, 7:26) from the 7th century, a text which heavily influenced many of these bestiaries. It was also thought at the time that the insatiable and rapacious pelican ate lizards and crocodiles (or lived off of them); as these were associated with snakes and by way of the story of the Garden of Eden the devil, they were also further associated with Christ and driving sin out of the world.
Thus the image is more appropriately read in its original context as Grosseteste giving a sermon about the suffering of Christ who is represented by a pelican floating above the scene being depicted.
-
- Mar 2022
-
-
The study’s authors suggest that this discrepancy may emerge fromdifferences in boys’ and girls’ experience: boys are more likely to play withspatially oriented toys and video games, they note, and may become morecomfortable making spatial gestures as a result. Another study, this oneconducted with four-year-olds, reported that children who were encouraged togesture got better at rotating mental objects, another task that draws heavily onspatial-thinking skills. Girls in this experiment were especially likely to benefitfrom being prompted to gesture.
The gender-based disparity of spatial thinking skills between boys and girls may result from the fact that at an early age boys are more likely to play with spatially oriented toys and video games. Encouraging girls to do more spatial gesturing at an earlier age can dramatically close this spatial thinking gap.
-
Yet the most popular and widely viewed instructional videos available onlinelargely fail to leverage the power of gesture, according to a team ofpsychologists from UCLA and California State University, Los Angeles. Theresearchers examined the top one hundred videos on YouTube devoted toexplaining the concept of standard deviation, an important topic in the study ofstatistics. In 68 percent of these recordings, they report, the instructor’s handswere not even visible. In the remaining videos, instructors mostly used theirhands to point or to make emphatic “beat” gestures. They employed symbolicgestures—the type of gesture that is especially helpful in conveying abstractconcepts—in fewer than 10 percent of the videos reviewed.
Symbolic gestures, which are the most valuable for relaying abstract information, are some of the least seen in online digital pedagogy. Slightly more frequent are "beat" gestures that are used for emphatic emphasis, while in the majority of studied online instructional videos the lecturers hands aren't seen on the video at all.
-
“symbolic gestures”—movementsthat capture the overall meaning of the speaker’s message—along with what arecalled “beat gestures”: hand motions that serve to punctuate a particular point.
There are two broad types of gestures: - symbolic gestures: movements that help to capture the semantic meaning of one's message; - beat gestures which serve to punctuate one's points.
Are there other gesture types or classifications? Is there research on the perceived ability of actors who perform these techniques? What about small facial movements like eyebrows which may serve these functions as well.
Relate to micro facial movement research as means of communicating emotion.
-