Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems

Writing is a highly visual and visible phenomenon. Even so, writing systems research has never capitalised on the potential to enhance our understanding of writing through a study of its visual aspects. In fact, visual features of writing systems are usually seen as incidental to properties that are considered more fundamental, such as the way they encode language, an aspect strongly entrenched in their categorisation. Up to now, research on visual elements and properties of writing systems has often been conducted by scholars working in isolation from each other, pursuing different disciplinary approaches to different groups of material. Even more importantly, there is no widely accepted blueprint for what visual approaches to writing should look like, what methodology they should follow or what kind of terminology we should use to talk about them.

Through new research on five specific pre-modern case studies, VIEWS takes writing systems research in a new direction. It probes important questions, such as the relationship between writing and visual culture, and the ways in which people encounter and interact with writing. It asks how we might reach a more nuanced understanding of writing systems if we were to categorise them by their visual properties, and investigate the ways in which visual and linguistic features interact. It seeks to establish innovative, interdisciplinary research methods, bringing archaeological, cognitive, linguistic, social-anthropological and visual-cultural approaches into dialogue with each other in order to pursue a more holistic picture of writing as a cultural phenomenon and practice.

Increasing its impact through an innovative Visiting Fellowship Scheme, a series of international conferences and the construction of a global research network bringing scholars in different disciplines together, the pioneering interdisciplinary research programme of the VIEWS project has the potential to change the ways we study and talk about writing.