Facing New Technologies (FNT): Written Artefacts Multiplied

The FNT Working Group has been exploring why some manuscript cultures transfer the functions of manuscripts to print, tape, online chat, or other digital media and why others, in turn, resist new technologies. This work has always been based on the realisation that these new technologies were in most cases associated with or caused social change. FNT has a broad understanding of techniques and technologies and, since writing involves a variety of techniques, the group’s research is not limited to innovations of the 19th and 20th centuries. One focus of FNT is the interaction between the visual organisation and materiality of manuscripts and technological innovations such as typographical printing. This was paradigmatically analysed, for example, in a long essay by Cornelius Berthold (in print), based on a large corpus and focusing on the period when Islamic-Arabic manuscript culture was rapidly shrinking. A second extensive paper by the same author discussed why some texts continued to be handwritten despite the dominance of printing. Using the example of a group of Chinese medical manuscripts from the 19th and early 20th centuries, Thies Staack has investigated the same question: in a detailed article, he shows that these manuscripts serve didactic and epistemic functions that corresponding prints could not fulfil. Another group member, Scott Reese, discussed the complicated relationship between manuscripts and print within the Islamic written tradition of East Africa in an edited volume and a contribution to this volume. In their analysis of hybrid Buddhist manuscripts from Luang Prabang, Silpsupa Jaengsawang and Volker Grabowsky discussed written artefacts that combined handwriting, typewriting, and print and in which typewriting was also used to inscribe traditional palm leaves.

These and other topics, such as typewriting in general, woodblock printing, lithography, new writing supports/tools, and digitisation of manuscripts, have been discussed at the monthly meetings of the Working Group and in two workshops in 2022 and 2024. Because of its focus, FNT has maintained close links with ‘Selecting Materials’ (Research Field K), not least in the 2024 workshop organised by FNT and RFK.

The activities of FNT have shown that further research into the techniques and technologies used to multiply manuscripts appears to be particularly fruitful. Two UWA workshops on woodblock printing and lithography, held in April 2024 and planned for 2025, respectively, are aimed in precisely this direction. The approach can also be applied to written artefacts in general, as inscriptions, for example, were multiplied by squeezing or rubbing. In April 2024, the Working Group decided to focus on these means of multiplying written artefacts and added ‘Written Artefacts Multiplied’ to its title. In particular, future work aims to clarify how the basic assumption of the singularity of many written artefacts can be modified from this perspective.

Spokesperson: Tilman Seidensticker