Getting Started on Deaf Research: Part 4

This is highly non-academic weather. Students skip classes, professors cancel them, and librarians wish they were outside. It's such a significant change from the last three or four months of ice, clouds, and generic freezing misery that I keep looking around and wondering where I landed.

These last few weeks of clouds have been good for my reading list, though. I managed to eke out one last book: Silent Dances by A.C. Crispin and Kathleen O'Malley. Pure sci-fi, total mental vacation. It's nice!

This book is notable because one of the authors is deaf, and so is the protagonist. It's part of the StarBridge series of novels, set in a future where humanity has, for the first time, discovered that there is life out there -- and most of it belongs to an interstellar group of species (called the CLS, interestingly enough). As part of the process of applying for membership, Earth helps establish a multispecies school for young people who want to work for the CLS, called StarBridge Academy.

Silent Dances is the second book in the series. Tesa is a student at StarBridge Academy; she's a deaf American Indian who relies on ASL and a highly-advanced portable computer/translator that's capable of distinguishing between multiple speakers at once and accurately transcribing all the dialogue that's going on. She graduated from Gallaudet (!) before starting at StarBridge, and is about to get started on her last major project, sort of a practicum, before officially graduating. However, she gets sidetracked by the news that a new world has been found, populated chiefly by hundreds of species of giant avians. One species in particular, resembling cranes, appears to be intelligent -- but have such powerful voices that they can kill a human being from hundreds of yards away. They rely on their voices only for what they call "primitive" uses -- for mating or for warnings -- and use a form of sign language in all other cases.

Of course, hearing people are at a marked disadvantage here, what with tending to explode and die, so they send Tesa in so she can learn to communicate with them and evaluate their intelligence. This is complicated by the sudden news that a black-market ring of privateers has been capturing the intelligent cranes and selling their skins in an especially sketchy part of the galaxy, as well as the discovery that the cranes are actually at war with another species on their own planet -- which turns out to also be intelligent.

It's your typical sci-fi action-adventure in space, colored by the fact that everyone signs in one way or another. There's also a sort of minor -- but significant to deaf readers -- plotline about the development of a new surgical technique that can restore Tesa's hearing. She's ambivalent about it at first, in spite of her parents' encouragement, but in the end decides against it. There are also instances that ring very true with me, as a deaf person -- like when Tesa's hearing love interest suddenly turns away from her when someone interrupts as she's signing to him. He does it totally unconsciously, and then realizes a few minutes later that he completely cut her off mid-sentence without thinking anything of it, and turns back to see that she's livid. Another example of something that I can relate to, of course, are the few instances when she completely forgets herself and yells a profanity at the top of her lungs for one reason or another.

There's also the fact that she's an American Indian, which lends itself to a unique relationship with the intelligent avians, especially when it's discovered that many aspects of their cultures and relationships with their environments are similar in many ways.

It's really an interesting book -- thought-provoking and a nice read in general. I especially liked the way O'Malley inserted her own prediction about Gallaudet and the form it takes after another two centuries of growth and development. It's especially interesting when taking the Sixth Street Project into consideration ... but I'll just leave it at that.

Today, we'll finish up the rest of the Deaf Research Help series with a quick run-through of whatever's left. We've done the pathfinders, FAQs, and the Guide to Deaf Biographies. Really, those are the three big things that usually manage to answer most questions.

After those three, you'll see a link to our Index to Deaf Periodicals. Another product of Tom Harrington, it's a good, basic way to find out about anything that was published on a given topic or by a specific person in the following deaf-related periodicals during specific years:

1. American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb (v.1-38, 1847-1893)
2. Deaf American (v.26-39, 1973-1989)
3. Deaf American Monographs (v.40-48, 1990-1998)
4. Deaf Life (v.1-11, 1987-1998, 2002)
5. DeafNation (v.1-3, 1995-1998)
6. Silent Worker (v.1-14, 1948-1962)
   

One extremely important thing to bear in mind is that this is an index. There's no full-text here. It's just intended to help you figure out out the following:

• What articles has this person written?
• What articles have been written about this topic, individual, organization, or family?
• What was published during this year?

Keeping in mind, of course, that the index includes only what was published in the periodicals listed above, and only during the years listed. It can come in handy, though, if you're trying to remember the name of that article you read in DeafNation about how the ADA might have caused interpreter shortages sometime in the 1990s, for example, or if you're curious about myths about sign language.

Once you've got the basic information on where, when, and who published the article you're looking for, you can then find the full text of the article here at the Library. The earliest years of American Annals have been digitized, as well as the Silent Worker, and are available online for Consortium members, while the rest may also be available electronically, on print, or on microfilm here at the Library. It's pretty nice!

Following the Index to Deaf Periodicals on the Deaf Research Help page, you'll find links to other Gallaudet-created resources, including the Gallaudet Video Catalog and the Clerc Center's Info to Go for parents and educators of deaf children, and then a link to a list of outside resources such as the Described and Captioned Media Program.

Down at the bottom of the Deaf Research Help page is mostly information for our librarian brethren and sistern. Tips on communicating with deaf library patrons, which is intended for hearing librarians who have little experience in working with deaf patrons, and Deaf Subject Headings, which is pretty technical and not for the layman. It's a collection of deaf-related terms, designed to help librarians in other institutions catalog deaf-related materials.

And that's it for Deaf Research Help. I hope this ... well, helped!

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Question of the Week
Why do you stay open during Spring Break?
I have asked myself that very question! Just kidding ... or am I?

Truthfully, I get the feeling that students think the campus completely shuts down during the break while they're gone, which doesn't actually happen. It's business as usual, except there are no classes and we have reduced hours to go with the reduced number of students. We really do continue working -- there's always plenty to do, with or without a line at the Service Desk!

We're also open during the breaks between each semester. The only exception is part of the break between the Fall and Spring semesters, when the campus shuts down entirely between Christmas and New Year's Day, but the rest of the time, we're wide open!