Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author
Download 2.48 Mb. View original pdf
|
| < previous page page_116 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page page_117 next page > Page too slow to publish. Very little was published by the Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Studies until 1979, and in that year, when The Signs of Language came out, Ursula Bellugi admitted in the preface that "it is quite safe to say that we would still be revising the manuscript now had our editors not gently pried it loose from us" Differences in the day-to-day methods of operation in the two labs led Charlotte Baker-Shenk to distinguish between the "scarcity" and "plenty" models of research, applying the latter description to Stokoe's approach. But even Baker-Shenk found working with Stokoe somewhat frustrating at times: Remember, I was coming from that academic model that there is a limited amount of time, we've got to get going, we've got all these things that have to get done, we've got grant funding which we've got to account for, and sometimes we'd become very frustrated during conversations with Bill. I mean, could you please stay on the topic, could you please address these issues in away that's not rambling and free association, but more of the scientific model that I wanted I remember regularly feeling frustrated by that. Now that I'm a little bit older, I really appreciate that in a person.35 Baker-Shenk's comments mirror Stokoe's self-described philosophy in running the lab: I followed my own heart, and that's what I let the other people in the lab do. They came up with an idea and it looked like a good idea tome or looked like an idea that might turnout to be good if they put some work behind it. I don't know any other way of proceeding when you're doing real research. I mean, if the people in administration thought our job was to take an ancient paradigm and continue to supply data to support it, then that's not research as far as I'm concerned that's just going through the motions.36 Putting "some work behind" what "looked like a good idea" wasn't standard research methodology. Robbin Battison remembers that 'it took some getting used to" particularly when he and another researcher, Lynn Friedman, first arrived, having Download 2.48 Mb. Share with your friends:
|