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From Example
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Template

Examples are units of knowledge that illustrate an interesting fact or observation about an object of study.

  • Introduce the argument underlying the example
    • What relationships are addressed?
  • How does this example reflect the exhibition goals
  • What is the current state of thinking
  • How does a more-than-human framing challenge the status-quo
  • Include representative examples as images, diagrams, videos, quotes, etc.
  • How would this re-framing benefit life, scholarship, practice, etc.?
  • What exhibition components relate to this example?
    • Examples
    • Stories
    • Relationships

  • Language emerges from environment
    • Culture
      • Socioeconomic dynamics
      • Narratives
        • History, myth and legend, oral traditions, politics
        • Internal narrative
    • Agent interactions
      • Predator-prey dynamics
    • Cognition
  • Languages privilege speaker perception
    • Bias in human language
  • Language changes with environment
    • Robert MacFarlane
      • Disappearing nature words

Examples

Non-human language

Species other than humans communicate using methods resembling language. Fungi transmit fifty distinct electrical signals in response to external stimuli. Bees communicate the location of flowers through 'dances'.

  • Species with language
    • Fungi
    • Crows
    • Chimpanzees

Language about Colour

From Language about Colour
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  • Colour words describe ambiguous sub-sets of the colour spectrum
  • Words refer to indeterminate ranges of colour spectrum
  • Colour terms emerge over time
    • Charting the spread of colour words using the Historical Thesaurus.3
  • Development of secondary colour terms in English.4
  • Distribution of words for colours varies across human groups
  • Colour words have some universal associations.1
  • Some languages lack any colour terms

    • [T]he article presents a detailed study of the visual world reflected in the Australian language Warlpiri and in Warlpiri ways of speaking, showing that while Warlpiri people have no ‘colour-talk’ (and no colour-practices’), they have a rich visual discourse of other kinds, linked with their own cultural practices.6

  • Group factors influence distribution of words across visible spectrum
    • Human perception limited to subset of electromagnetic spectrum
      • Bees perceive infrared light
    • Environment
      • Distribution of colours in agent environment
    • Social, cultural, and economic factors
  • Human language struggles to capture other experiences of colour
    • Humans communicate using language
      • Implications for science, justice, design
    • See Bias in Language experiment

Footnotes

  1. Marc Alexander and Christian Kay, “The Spread of RED in the Historical Thesaurus of English,” in Colour Studies, ed. Wendy Anderson et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014), 126–39, https://doi.org/10/dvk3.˄

  2. Casson, Ronald W. “Russett, Rose, and Raspberry: The Development of English Secondary Color Terms.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 4, no. 1 (1994): 5–22. https://doi.org/10/c8tmdh.˄

  3. Biggam, Carole P. “Prehistoric Colour Semantics: A Contradiction in Terms.” In Colour Studies: A Broad Spectrum, edited by Wendy Anderson, Carole P. Biggam, Carole Hough, and Christian Kay, 3–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014.˄

  4. Wierzbicka, Anna. “Why There Are No ‘Colour Universals’ in Language and Thought.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14, no. 2 (2008): 407–25. https://doi.org/10/d894bn.˄

Ecocentric Language

References

Albrecht, Glenn A. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019.

Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew, and Brent Ryan Bellamy, eds. An Ecotopian Lexicon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Bibliography

Andrew Adamatzky, "Language of Fungi Derived from Their Electrical Spiking Activity," Royal Society Open Science 9, no. 4 (2022): 211926, https://doi.org/10/gptxb9

Mohammad Mahdi Dehshibi and Andrew Adamatzky, "Electrical Activity of Fungi: Spikes Detection and Complexity Analysis," Biosystems 203 (2021): 104373, https://doi.org/10/gh3k7t

Chris S. Duvall, "Prosaic, Poetic, Psychedelic, and Paranormal Communications of Plants," in Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, ed. Stanley D. Brunn and Roland Kehrein (Cham: Springer, 2020), 1903–19

Mary Lee Jensvold, "Lessons from Chimpanzee Sign Language Studies," Animal Sentience 20, no. 17 (2018): 1–4, https://doi.org/10.51291/2377-7478.1306

Monica Gagliano, John Ryan, and Patricia I. Vieira, eds., The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

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