More than 160 participantsUWA Conference 2023: Programme Now Online

7 August 2023

Photo: Karsten Helmholz

From 27 to 29 September, the Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts is organising the most comprehensive conference of its current funding phase. The programme of ‘Studying Written Artefacts: Challenges and Perspectives’ has now been published and registration is open.

Regular lectures, conferences, and workshops are part of everyday life at a Cluster of Excellence like UWA. However, the conference ‘Studying Written Artefacts: Challenges and Perspectives’ from 27 to 29 September 2023 is exceptional in many respects: with over 160 speakers and around 120 presentations, it is by far the largest conference that UWA is realising in its current funding phase. The focus is not on a specific writing culture, a certain type of written artefact or a particular question; rather, the conference follows the Cluster’s programmatic approach to take a comparative look at all types of written artefacts from all epochs and cultures.

With this breadth, ‘Studying Written Artefacts’ creates a unique forum for researchers from numerous disciplines who are engaged with any aspects of contemporary research on written artefact, from philological approaches to material analysis to the application of AI tools and the ethical responsibility of researchers towards the written cultural heritage. Sorted thematically, three days of parallel sessions will feature lectures as well as panel discussions and poster presentations.

The full conference programme has now been released and is available for download on the conference website. Registration for the conference is now open for everyone who is interested. Participants can register for the entire conference as well as for individual days. In contrast to most CSMC events, the conference will not take place in hybrid mode, but is planned entirely as an in-person event.

• Download the preliminary programme of ‘Studying Written Artefacts: Challenges and Perspectives’ (PDF)
• Register for ‘Studying Written Artefacts: Challenges and Perspectives’ 

The start of the UWA 2023 conference also marks the end of an unusual art project that has been unfolding on the CSMC website for over two years: Axel Malik’s ‘Increasing Countdown’ – a digital writing band of unreadable characters to which a new one has been added every day since 1 September 2021 – reaches its 756th and thus final character on 27 September.