Abstract
In ethnographically oriented linguistic landscape studies, social spaces are
studied in co-operation with research participants, many times through mobile
encounters such as walking. Talking, walking, photographing and video recording
as well as writing the fieldwork diary are activities that result in the
accumulation of heterogeneous, multimodal corpora. We analyze data from a
Hungarian school ethnography project to reconstruct fieldwork encounters and
analyze embodiment, the handling of devices (e.g. the photo camera) and verbal
interaction in exploratory, participant-led walking tours. Our analysis shows
that situated practices of embodied conduct and verbal interaction blur the
boundaries between observation and observers, and thus LL research is not only
about space- and place-making and sense-making routines, but the fieldwork
encounters are also transformative and contribute to space- and place-making
themselves. Our findings provide insight for ethnographic researchers and enrich
the already robust qualitative and quantitative strategies employed in the
field.