General Education Requirements
Course Description
Handwriting has a long history and significance. Some handwriting is prized beyond price: Toni Morrison’s diaries; a note by Einstein; a Laozi manuscript from the second century; Elizabeth I’s poems; hieroglyphic laws; and famous forged documents. Some handwriting—an electronic signature, a postcard from a friend, a tattoo, graffiti—is personal, sometimes countercultural, and embodies the individual. All handwriting is the focus of continuing efforts to develop accurate handwriting recognition software so that the world’s written record can be automatedly transcribed, but who will read it?
This course will investigate the history and practice of handwriting, focusing on the importance of this manual technology, its digital aspects, and computational tools for reading script. Handwriting is more than mechanical, though. The thirteenth-century Arabic calligrapher Yaqut al-Musta'simi said “Perfection of handwriting needs proper education, regular exercises, and purity of the soul,” and so we’ll also think about how and why handwriting is believed to represent the personality, intelligence, and even morality of the writer.
We shall consider the training and physical efforts of scribes, and the methods of transmission of knowledge, including that of traditionally oral cultures. We’ll look at the development of western scripts, gain insight on materials and tools (from papyrus and animal skin to quills and reed pens) and get an introduction to calligraphy from an expert modern scribe. This will lead us to understand the skill and aesthetic of this most everyday of technologies that, as I’ll argue, will outlive all others.
Meet the Instructor: Elaine Treharne
“I'm a Professor of English, specializing in early British literatures, archives and manuscript studies, and technologies of human communication. Handwriting has fascinated me since I was a child, when I would send letters to my family using mirror writing. I knew from an early age, too, that my career would involve working with documents and books, and so one of my graduate degrees was in Archive Administration. I've published a lot on early books and documents, and I led a big computational project on medieval information retrieval tools. Working alongside scribes, parchment- and paper-makers, I've learned how medieval manuscripts were produced using animal skin and inks made from wasps’ galls or crushed minerals. I collect letters, diaries, vintage postcards, autograph albums, and old documents for study, and I’m interested in every aspect of writing from the physical process itself to issues of legibility and “bad” handwriting, its cultural value, forensic importance and the methods and uses of graphology.”
