Scripta: History and practices of writing
The Interdisciplinary and Strategic Research Initiative (IRIS) entitled “Scripta-PSL: The History and practices of writing,” organized by EPHE and EFEO under the direction of Andreas Stauder, research director at EPHE, combines the science of writing (paleography, codicology), the humanities and social sciences (linguistics, history, anthropology) and computer science to explore ancient writing in all its historical diversity.
Directors: Andréas Stauder (EPHE), Philip Huyse (EPHE), Charlotte Schmid (EFEO)
Steering committee: Isabelle Pantin, Béatrice Fraenkel (EHESS), Jean-Luc Fournet (Collège de France) Muriel Debié (EPHE), Marc Smith (ENC), François Bougard (IRHT), Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra (EPHE).
The globalization of writing and the current digital revolution have dictated profound changes in the civilization of writing, affecting its materiality, production, circulation, and effects. The current landscape is driving a scientific study of the full historic depth of these aspects, starting with the earliest civilizations to use writing and covering a broad geographic scope, from the Far East to the Mediterranean. In parallel, the rapidly developing digital universe offers completely new prospects for scientific study of the ancient written word.
PSL’s institutions are unique in their concentration of expertise in a diverse variety of ancient languages and writing systems, some of them rare or even extremely rare. Scripta brings together this expertise, the fundamental sciences of the written word (paleography, codicology, epigraphy, history of the book, etc.) with other social and human sciences (linguistics, history, anthropology, etc.) and the digital and computational humanities in relation to the study of the written word. The program thus includes “Research,” “Digital and Computational Humanities,” “Training,” and “Rare Languages” subsets. Research focuses on six main areas:
“Writing systems and languages - the linguistics of writing”
“ ‘Pages’ - visual fields for reading”
“Exposed writings - inscriptions in space”
“Documentary practices, ancient and modern”
“The circulation of writing - the canonization process”
“Challenges for digital scientific publication”
Two calls for proposals will be issued each year.