The virtual and the real. Digital culture and the body in the study of handwriting

Abstract

Since Traube (1861-1907) paleography has been concerned primarily with methods for transcribing, dating and placing texts. This paper responds to two changes in perspective that have occurred within western culture over the last century: the arrival of a digital world which saw the transformation of computers from calculating devices into new tools for writing and reading and a cultural shift away from a Cartesian perspective that distinguishes between body and mind and privileges self aware rationality over felt experience. For the purposes of this paper the link between these trends is that both throw new emphasis on writing as an activity rather than a product. This paper looks at how insights from the digital, and body-based disciplines of document creation might then interact with the paleographical and each other. The influences all run both ways, the paleographical can effect the digital as much an understanding of the digital can bring new ways of seeing to the paleographical.