Public Signs
 

It must have been around 2007 that I started taking pictures of public signs. I had just bought my first digital camera and it felt very liberating not to depend on films with a maximum capacity of 36 pictures. I am sure this technological advancement has inspired many people to photograph all sorts of things that they would have never considered wasting a film on before. In my case, it led to a collection of thousands of public signs, especially directive ones, from a wide range of countries. And as I discovered many years later, there were many more linguists, especially those interested in different forms of societal multilingualism, who made a good use of their digital cameras, which resulted in a new area of inquiry called Linguistic Landscape studies.

 

While I never got tired of taking these pictures, it took a pandemic for me to finally turn this hobby into research. During the first lockdown, in spring 2020, I used my allowance of "one form of exercise per day" to systematically walk up and down the streets of my London borough and photograph all Covid-19 related signs that came into my view. As I am always eager to add a contrastive perspective to my research, I convinced Pepy Bella to photograph Covid-19 signs in Athens. The results of this research have been published in the form of four journal articles comparing different aspects of English and Greek signs that announced closures during the first lockdown (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024).

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Having accumulated a collection of roughly 3000 Covid-19 signs, I have now managed to get some funding (courtesy of the Leverhulme Trust) that will hopefully allow me to analyse them all! Some more information on what I intend to do can be found here.

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