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EXC 2176:  Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission

Subject Area Social and Cultural Anthropology, Non-European Cultures, Jewish Studies and Religious Studies
History
Computer Science
Art History, Music, Theatre and Media Studies
Condensed Matter Physics
Term since 2019
Website Homepage
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 390893796
 
The Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts (UWA) embarks on a reappraisal of one of human history’s most impactful technologies: handwriting. Scholarship has primarily focused on writing’s epistemic implications, such as its ability to foster abstraction, promote standardisation, shape memory and circulate ideas and texts. UWA takes a different approach to develop a new paradigm and framework, summarised by our concept of the ‘written artefact’, defined as ‘any artificial or natural object with visual signs applied by humans’ (Bausi et al. 2023). Mesopotamian clay tablets of the 19th century BCE are as much part of UWA’s remit as 16th-century inscribed Chinese golden plates and contemporary European urban graffiti. This comprehensive understanding of humanity’s handwritten heritage enables our scholarly community to study the material dimensions of written artefacts in relation to their content in order to provide a fuller understanding of how societies have shaped writing and how writing has shaped human history. UWA I has made decisive progress in establishing a cross-disciplinary community of almost 140 experts from more than 40 disciplines and creating a distinct brand of bottom-up research. The cluster and its teams have collectively established working routines across long-entrenched academic boundaries: those between regions (especially between Europe and other world regions), periods (such as between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the modern period) and disciplines (between the Humanities, Natural Sciences and Computer Science). While continuing to combine material analysis and content, UWA II will reorganise the first phase’s empirical groundwork and organisational structure into an agile, impact-oriented structure centred around nine objectives, thus promoting a dynamic and relational view on written artefacts. In terms of global perspectives, we will introduce the notion of ‘entangled histories of writing’, exploring, including through a strong focus on provenancing, how the production and usage processes of written artefacts were connected. Extending our mission to overcome established media typologies, we will apply our written artefact concept to the global technology of mechanical reproduction of writing, challenging the customary dichotomy between handwritten and printed artefacts. New ‘Concepts & Methods Units’ will foreground self-reflective approaches to the epistemological and ethical dimensions of research practices. The cluster’s expanding laboratory system will broaden the toolkit of material analyses and AI-driven approaches to acquire original empirical insights and explore new options for data analysis. To fully exploit the cross-disciplinary and transcultural opportunities inherent in this recalibrated research agenda, we will implement the ‘Project Groups’ format that applies our paradigm and framework to topics across larger regions and periods.
DFG Programme Clusters of Excellence (ExStra)
Applicant Institution Universität Hamburg
 
 

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