Proposal of Visual Grammar for the Description and Compositional Analysis of Digital Videos in Sign Languages

ABSTRACT With the emergence of production and wide circulation of videos through the internet, deaf persons have gained a new and independent space for cultural expression, forming, in the last 20 years, digital collections that materially constitute a deaf-memory in sign languages. Thus, this paper presents the mapping and proposal of a visual grammar for pedagogic and academic-cultural videos in sign languages that currently circulate in digital repositories, in particular, YouTube. This study has a twofold aim: to propose an iconic representation for video artifacts created by/for the deaf community and to present an initial catalog of visual solutions captured from these products, organizing them for future authors and content creators. In terms of methodology, we focus on the compositional approach used in the analysis of 24 productions selected and examined by our research group in 2017-2018. As an outcome of the study, we have defined seven constituent basic elements and a set of possible variations and relationships between them, borrowing, for inspiration, categories originally presented by image and visual art theorists, including Arnheim, Dondis, and Leborg.