Digital Lunch Seminar Series

Evolution of Writing Systems: How the Material Choice and Phenomenology of Handwriting Shaped Southeast Asian Scripts

Małgorzata Grzelec, Laura Gallardo, and Elisa Barney Smith

The graphical forms of handwriting are thought to develop under the influence of multiple factors, including the tools and materials used in their production. Certain Southeast Asian writing...

Decorating Tibetan Xylographs: Codicological Elements Unveiling Provenance and Dating

Michela Clemente (The International Association for Mediterranean and Oriental Studies)

Tibetan xylographs can be considered as an extension of the scribal culture. Woodblocks seek to faithfully reproduce handwritten originals; accordingly, prints retain the codicological elements exhibited in Tibetan...

Recognised primarily as the writing substrate used in Mesoamerican codices, amate and its production are often perceived as equivalent to historical paper and papermaking traditions in Europe and Asia. However, a closer examination of the amate manufacturing process reveals a distinct local technology, which may have evolved through contact with European papermaking following colonization.

This...

Manuscripts as Witnesses to the Cultural Contexts and Material Conditions of Textual Transmission: The MsPhys Project

Professor Dr Shari Boodts (Radboud Institute for Culture and History, Radboud University

Medieval manuscripts are an inexhaustible source of information about the past. By their very nature, they facilitate, even encourage, modifications from copy to copy, providing a distinctive...

Lecture 6/7

Isabelle Ratié:

Reading, Writing, Philosophising in Medieval India

Digital Lunch Seminar Series

Milk, Brain, Blood: Proteinaceous Substances of Animal Origin Used in Tibetan Manuscript Production. A Case Study of Khams Brygyd Volumes from the Oslo University Library Collection

Agnieszka Helman-Ważny and Małgorzata Grzelec

The process of religious manuscripts production in Tibet concerns various raw materials of local origin used in their production, primarily...

For over two millennia, the Psalms have served as a source of devotion, identity, and artistic inspiration across cultures and traditions. While their textual traditions are relatively well studied, the extent of the Psalms’ rich material and visual heritage—transcribed on parchment, carved in stone, woven into textiles, and integrated into diverse media—has never been fully investigated. This...

Digital Lunch Seminar Series

Computational Visual Cataloguing: A Case Study of Rilke’s Notebooks

Sandra Richter and Hussein Mohammed  

This talk presents a case study on Rainer Maria Rilke’s notebooks. In this work, page-level and word-level attributes, such as orientation, colour and writing implement, are detected and linked to specific locations. This process yields “computational visual...

Digital Lunch Seminar Series

Japanese Paper Clothing

Eike Grossmann and Agnieszka Helman-Ważny 

Japanese washi—a paper celebrated for its unmatched strength, durability, and versatility—transcends its conventional role as a writing surface. Far more than writing surface, washi has been ingeniously adapted into sliding doors (shōji), umbrellas, lampshades, toys, and even clothing, blending...

Lecture 7/7

Yael Gazit:

Don’t Look Back in Anger: Reconsidering Appropriation of Past Philosophy 

Parchment as 11 Layers of Language

Matthew Collins (University of Cambridge)

I will argue that the future of the humanities lies in a "knowledge ecology" where in areas such as the biomolecular humanities, biologists, historians, and digital researchers should co-create meaning from the inception of research. Just as the Danish Kitchen Midden Commission of 1848 revolutionized interdisciplinary...