WAVE 2: Writing As Visual Engagement, conference reflections

You never really know, when you organise a conference, what it will be like. But I wasn’t quite prepared for this to be the BANGING conference it turned out to be, as one participant described it! And I feel both delighted with and humbled by the feedback from everyone who took part. I can’t recount everything, so I will use this blog post to share some reflections on the conference, and of course some pictures!

WAVE 2 took place over four days in person in Cambridge with a hybrid audience (26th-29th March) and one day fully online (11th April). The theme for the conference, Writing As Visual Engagement, was interpreted by the presenters in many different ways, and it was a real joy to experience the diversity of topics, scripts and places on the agenda.

We started on the Thursday afternoon with an inspiring paper on the “Betaverse” by Tim Brookes, set to musical accompaniment from Pule kaJanolintji and Alice Mazzilli: a powerful call to action that reminded us of the individuality of handwriting and the humanity behind it. I’m very sad that we didn’t manage to capture the audio properly (the musical element was a rather late development), so it will remain forever as a performance where you quite literally had to be there. But maybe that says something about the performativity of handwriting too.

Aaron Koller then looked at the aesthetics of writing, comparing the traditions of the Roman serif, Arabic calligraphy and Hebrew micrography as different ways of harnessing alphabetic writing for visual effects. Jordan Miller explored the lines of Egyptian writing, in multiple senses, from the “furrows” they followed to the outlines of hieroglyphic signs. Oreen Yousuf introduced the Minim Dag Noore script of Burkina Faso and neighbouring countries, whose direction of reading can be left-to-right or right-to-left depending on training, with text either in ALL CAPS or all lowercase. Kasia Mikulska used the intriguing manuscript Aubin 20 to demonstrate the intricate graphic respresentation of the Mesoamerican cosmos in the context of divinatory practices. And Joanna Homrighausen entertained us with the tale of the book of Esther through the script and style choices of JT Waldman’s graphic novel.

After a whirlwind opening to the conference, we all headed to the Cast Gallery (AKA the Museum of Classical Archaeology) for drinks, nibbles, chatting and group photos.

The Friday got off to a flying start with Aleksandra Twardokęs’s discussion of stylistic choices in band logos and album covers. Bálint Berémenyi followed with a reanalysis of the concept of “retrograde” writing in Egyptian, where passages of text read contrary to the expected direction, always with some contextual motivation. Josh Fitzgerald explored the speech scrolls of Mesoamerican writing from a comparative perspective, a quite literal entanglement of writing and orality. Then Yanru Xu looked at the bird signs of Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Naxi-Dongba Script and Chinese Oracle Bone Inscriptions, discussing their specificity and comparing strategies across the three scripts.

The morning was rounded off by Kevin Graaf’s talk on the challenges and opportunities of digitising hieroglyphic scripts and their complex arrangements of the signs, demonstrating his Dubsar program as used to type Mayan – which has since rather quickly become our most viewed ever video on YouTube! And then we stopped for lunch to refresh our mental energy for the afternoon.

After lunch we started with a magsterial demonstration by Jade Wang-Szilas of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) she developed for Dongba script, concentrating on the visual choices made around presenting the signs and their role in the wider graphoculture. Then Hanny Imania presented her work with Javanese, and the challenges of typographic rendering of the markers of social hierarchy contained in the script. Helen Magowan followed by looking at the reduction in allographic variation in Japanese in conjunction with the eventual adoption of moveable type in the 19th century, which conversely made earlier Japanese writing all but unreadable for modern Japanese readers. Her incorporation of Hokusai’s Wave did not go unnoticed! In the last session of the day Albert Davletshin gave a remote presentation on the different kinds of pictorial signs in a writing system like Mayan, requiring different kinds of visual thinking to understand their meaning. Finally Merten a Campo analysed the directional features of some of the earliest attestations of writing from Crete, alongside related problems of sign orientation and graphic composition in the context of minute seal surfaces.

On the Saturday we braced ourselves for another day of riveting content, which began with perhaps the best designed pairing of the whole conference: Alice Mazzilli’s interowriting followed by Pule kaJanolintji’s interoreading. Alice demonstrated the problems with confining writing to a lens dominated by cartesian dualism of mind and body, writing and art, reframing writing as a relational process in which gesture, mark, tension, space, attention and perception co-constitute a mode of being; it is through non-being, through chora, that meaning is revealed. Pule picked up these threads as he described the philosophy of ||Kabbo, a South African |Xam sage who related the way in which, when the name or sign for a thing matches its image or concept, a person feels it inside their body as a true sign (|ʼam̩), as affect – a completely different ontological approach from the western dominant Aristotelian model; he followed this through the design and use of the Ditema tsa Dinoko script. Alice and Pule’s collaboration even resulted in a new symbol, which you can see below: growing out of an intersection between chora and its Italian translation luogo, and then placed at the intersection of ||o and ||e, I and You, where the potentiality of escape into nothingness exists.

In the next session Colton Siegmund showed the statues of Gudea from ancient Lagaš, whose cuneiform text avoids the area of the buttocks – a clear design decision rooted in concepts of hegemonic masculinity. Mia Pancotti then introduced the ancient Greek stoichedon style of writing, with its curious choice to lay out text in perfect grids such that every letter lined up beautifully, but reading became not unlike picking out individual words from a wordsearch puzzle. It was particularly wonderful that Mia included my son Ben in one of her slides, in honour of his favourite occupation: laying out the alphabetic sequence in aesthetically pleasing arrangements!

We were very much ready for an extra long lunch break by this point, which included a beautiful jamming session by Tim and Pule while people participated in jamigraphy (on which concept see this earlier post) alongside sandwiches, cakes and conversation. I was really thrilled to see people joining in with these exercises in group writing, both adding their own contributions to sheets of paper hung on the wall and making extra name badges with their names in different scripts. There was so much good feeling, and so many smiles, a real pleasure to witness.

After lunch, Yue Chen introduced the minority Yi script of China, describing its history and extensive variability as well as the challenges of digitisation of the traditional ideographic script. Then Jordan Williams gave us a lesson in reframing our expectations of and approaches to writing, showing us how to identify and understand meaning in a modern revival of ideographic Nsibidi, an ancient script originating from Nigeria/Cameroon but also surfacing through the diaspora in the Caribbean and America. Campbell Rosener opened the final session of the day with her presentation of the OIMOI corpus from ancient Selinous, Sicily, where gravestones used this striking word alongside choices of layout and negative space to evoke memory and absence. Finally, John Mawby delivered a presentation put together by Lida Lopes Cardozo and Roxanne Kindersley about the work of the Cardozo Kindersley stonecutting workshop here in Cambridge, and their work to use materials, tools and stylistic choices to make letters quite literally last.

Sunday came all too soon, the last (half-)day of the in-person conference, beginning with Mnemosyne Rice’s discussion of Linear A inscriptions on stone, and the technical choices that led to their visual differences from the perhaps better known inscriptions on clay. Daniel Yacob then introduced us to the use of colour – particularly rubrication – in the Ethiopic tradition, whose long history is ongoing as shown in its incorporation even in some modern digitally printed works. Chunfeng Zhang looked at the reading order of Naxi Dongba texts, particularly the differences between those with fictional and factual focus. Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz gave a stunning account of his expeditions in Angola studying Kongo graphic writing, whose very principles of constructing meaning require us to set aside any preconceptions and attempt to understand the cosmological, epistemological and social frameworks that engender their significance. Finally David Osgarby demonstrated the validity and importance of a grapholinguistic and sociolinguistic approach to Pictish writing as well as its visual interactions with other contemporary scripts.

Enriched, stimulated and completely exhausted – and following lots more photos and sad farewells – we all then needed a two week break before the final day of the conference, which took place online on Saturday 11th April. The day began with a paper by Roland Buckingham-Hsiao on Chinese calligraphy, with a particular emphasis on writing as something that is performed physically and socially. Dániel Takács then discussed the life of Egyptian hieroglyphic signs, both in the sense of their creation and interaction with wider visual culture, and in their vitality and perceived ability to act in the world. Hannah Sophie Schier approached the so-called “Mixed Ductus”, a particular style used in Akkadian cuneiform writing at the Hittite capital of Hattusa, as a deliberate elite strategy and diplomatic choice. We then had rather a long conversation during the lunch break chat session about what different people working in different disciplines understand by the word ductus – part of a long and ongoing debate over writing terminology!

In the final session of the whole conference, Nicole Hockmann introduced Old East Slavic writing on birch bark documents, considering what they can tell us about the complex interaction of spoken and written language. Aren Wilson-Wright then looked at the pictorial origins of Early Alphabetic letters, only some of which are confidently identified with Egyptian hieroglyphs or particular images or objects, in search of an elusive methodology to identify those whose origins are less obvious. Finally, Clara Martínez-Moreno presented a number of Egyptian medical remedies attested in papyrus documents that recommended writing on the body as part of a medical remedy, sometimes showing exactly what should be written – a rare insight into an “embodied” practice of writing that has otherwise left little trace.

With that the conference was over, but it will, I hope, have a lasting legacy. The proceedings will be published in our open access series with De Gruyter, an endeavour that will inevitably take a bit of time. In the meantime, if any of the above brief descriptions of participants’ papers have piqued your interest, remember that you can watch almost all of them on the YouTube playlist, or navigate to individual videos by clicking on the titles in the programme HERE.

I want to finish with a few notes about my personal takeaways from the conference. I was really blown away by the high quality, richness and diversity of all the presentations. All of the papers, in one form or another, emphasised that in order to understand writing practices in any given place at any given time, you really need to try to understand in depth the full cultural, social, epistemological, practical and material contexts in which they were or are taking place. A number of the writing traditions presented are seriously under-studied, while others might not even be considered writing in a strict glottographic or grapholinguistic sense (NB there is much further terminological debate to be had on these issues!). It was important to me that we did not put up boundaries between one tradition and another, and sure enough what emerged were numerous connections and similarities across scripts of all types and origins. And I was particularly delighted that we had such a great representation of African scripts, since this is an area where I am also developing research – and here we have a whole continent whose rich and diverse history of writing has been almost completely overlooked in scholarship.

Finally, I want to say how grateful I am to everyone who played a role in making this conference happen, both behind and in front of the scenes, and how humbled I am by the feedback I’ve received from participants. A few anonymised snippets can be seen below. Knowing that the people in the room felt welcome, inspired, supported and happy means such a great deal to me.

At the end, I was honoured to be presented with a special carving of the Adinkra sign for Ananse by Tim, pictured below. He later sent me this description: “Ananse is the clever spider of African folklore, and this is his web. In some interpretations, this symbol represents wisdom, craftiness, creativity, and the complexities of life. In others, it stands for the interconnectedness of the community, the fact that everyone depends on everyone else, and that one person cannot be affected without affecting everyone. In my version, the carving tool has left lines that make it look like a seven-petal flower, a rarity in nature. Carved in maple, March 2026.” I am all for embracing complexities – which I think was central to this conference – but I am even more grateful to be thought of as standing central to this incredible interconnected community of extremely lovely, clever and fascinating people. Thank you all!