CSMC-NTU ConferenceStandardisation of Written Artefacts in East Asia

22 August 2022

Photo: Karsten Helmholz

As part of a partnership established last year, CSMC and the National Taiwan University (NTU) held a joint conference from 17 to 19 August. After a predecessor event had taken place in Taipei in autumn 2021, the Taiwanese delegation now came to Hamburg for a return visit.

How do standards for the production of written artefacts come into existence and what are the practical needs behind them? Who are the agents in the formulation of standards, and how are they implemented, enforced, and maintained? And what differences can we note between privately and officially produced artefacts?

Focusing on the East Asian tradition, questions like these were at the centre of the three-day conference ‘Standardisation of Written Artefacts in East Asia’, which was held at CSMC from 17-19 August. The conference was jointly organised by CSMC and the Department of Chinese Literature at NTU, and thus followed up on a prior event, ‘Variants/Variance – Text, Form and Material’, which took place in Taiwan in from 23-24 October 2021. While the first conference was centred around aspects of variance in written artefacts, the recent one shifted the perspective to the and investigated pre-modern practices of regulation, unification, and standardisation in the production of written artefacts.

The visit of the Taiwanese delegation also included a joint trip to the Turfan Studies Project, which is located at the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften, on 16 August.