Writing As Visual Experience

Writing is an intrinsically visual practice. How writing looks, and how it is seen, are often of crucial importance – and yet visual aspects of writing remain critically undertreated in scholarship, with no agreed principles for studying them. Writing As Visual Experience uniquely brings together both academics and practitioners to present a diverse range of perspectives on the ways we can look at, and think about, the visual in historical and contemporary writing systems and practices. Several papers focus on the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, while others focus elsewhere, from the Andes to southern Africa to China, or on theoretical observations stemming from type design, graffiti and calligraphy. Growing out of a successful international conference, held under the aegis of the VIEWS project (Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems) at the University of Cambridge, this volume showcases a wealth of ongoing research. The contributions highlight the socially and physically contextualised choices that writers make, and show that the visuality and visibility of writing have been major factors in regional and/or diachronic developments over thousands of years.