Back in December we had to pleasure to be involved in a conference organised by CREWS Visiting Fellow Giorgos Bourogiannis, Beyond Cyprus: Investigating Cypriot Connectivity in the Mediterranean from the Late Bronze Age to the End of the Classical Period. This was an impressive four-day event, organised as part of Giorgos’s project on Cypriot Connectivity in the Mediterranean (CyCoMed), which is affiliated with the CREWS project.
Pippa’s recent adventure in Oxford at the Navigating the Text conference (Merton/Queens Colleges) and Babel exhibition (Bodleian Library), featuring some beautiful books and objects
When you write something down, how do you arrange the information in the writing space? This is actually not a straightforward question to answer, and it can be affected by all sorts of contextual considerations. What is the medium being written on, and what are its physical features and dimensions? Does your society have conventions about how to write down and arrange information? Are you writing it down for other people to read and consult, or just for yourself? Is your message clear in the linguistic content of what you are writing, or do you need to add illustrations? How can you visually break down complex information to make it easier to navigate?
These were the sorts of questions on the agenda at the Navigating the Text conference I was attending in Oxford this weekend.
The second of our three big CREWS project conferences took place recently: Exploring the Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Systems (14th-16th March 2019, see here for programme). I had been excited about it for a long time, but when it came I was absolutely blown away by the quality of the presentations and the new things I learned and the ways it has developed my thinking on writing practices. I’m going to use this blog post to try to pass on some of what I learned by telling you about themes that kept turning up over the three days, even in papers on completely different topics.
In December I was lucky enough to speak at two conferences, which were both very rewarding, although very different.
Last Saturday 20th October, our colleagues from Warwick University organised the workshop “Visuality of Text: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Display of the Word”, an opportunity that the CREWS project could not miss. What made this workshop especially interesting was the truly interdisciplinary nature of this event, which brought together academics researching material writing and professionals and artists whose work involves the display of texts.
The workshop started with three historical case studies from very different periods that showed the use of text on objects. Archaic Greek sculpture was covered by Nick Brown, Harry Prance presented on Byzantine eucharistic objects and Katherine Cross focused on Anglo-saxon weaponry.
Continue reading “Visuality of text, a workshop at Warwick University”
CREWS people have been busy with various conferences this year. In April Rob was involved in organising the conference, “A Corpus and Usage-based approach to Ancient Greek: From the Archaic Period until the Koine”, in Riga, together with colleagues from the University of Leipzig University and the University of Latvia (see here).
The aim was to bring together scholars working on all aspects of Greek language in the way it was actually used, rather than just focusing on an idealised presentation of the language, as has often been the case in more traditional approaches. This approach has, of course, been made possible in the last few decades with the phenomenal increase in computing power and data-storage, making large-scale corpus studies feasible that simply would not have been possible a century or even half a century ago. Continue reading “CREWS in Riga, Helsinki and Cambridge”
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