TextWorlds Seminar Series

Table of contents:

Introduction

Individual seminars organised by TextWorlds will be taking place in Autumn 2020 and Spring 2021, typically on weekdays later afternoon CEST. All seminars for Autumn 2020 will be held online as Zoom video meetings. The seminars are free and open for everyone. Participants should submit a registration request to attend individual seminars (listed under each seminar entry below), whereupon they will be issued a link for that seminar.

The TextWorlds Seminars invite speakers to introduce the textual corpus with which they are engaged as well as its digital manifestation in current research. Speakers are particularly invited to focus on quantiative, spatial, and temporal aspects such as corpus scale, extent, and chronology, patterns of script use and genre characteristics, the application and linguistic affiliation of scripts, the social and cultural aspects of texts production and consumption, and the preservation and discovery of textual sources. Papers may address any aspects of the epigraphical specialisation of the speaker but are expected to be accessible to an audience with no prior in-depth knowledge of the area.

Middle East c. 3200-0 BCE: The Cuneiform World

Wednesday 21 October 2020 16.00-18.00 CEST
Registration link: https://forms.gle/FPZrnQVBqghrsdjQ6
Seraina Nett and Rune Rattenborg from Assyriology at Uppsala University are joined by Co-PI of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative Émilie Pagé-Perron of the University of Toronto. The seminar dives into the +500,000 texts that make up the cuneiform corpus. Cuneiform is generally accepted to be the oldest script in human history, and was in widespread use across all of the Middle East and adjoining regions for more than three millennia, from c. 3,200 BCE until c. 100 CE.

  • Seraina Nett
    Researcher in Assyriology
    Department of Linguistics and Philology
    Uppsala University
    seraina.nett@lingfil.uu.se
  • Émilie Pagé-Perron 
    PhD candidate
    Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations
    University of Toronto
    epp@ucla.edu
  • Rune Rattenborg
    Researcher in Assyriology
    Department of Linguistics and Philology
    Uppsala University
    rune.rattenborg@lingfil.uu.se

Central Asia c. 700-1400 CE: The Database of Turkic Runifom and the Digital Turfan Archive 

Thursday 29 October 2020 16.00-17.00 CEST
Registration link: https://forms.gle/AjPkZQnmnjHPqoP46
Moving to Central Asia, this seminar introduces examples of written corpora from Central Asia. László Károly from Uppsala University will talk about the Turkic runiform corpus, dating c. 700-1000 CE, which extends across the immense Eurasian steppe from Mongolia to Central Europe. Hannes Fellner of the University of Vienna will introduce work to edit textual finds from the oasis of Turfan in the Xinjian province of the People's Republic of China, a corpus covering inscriptions in more than 20 different languages dating from 4th - 14th centuries CE.

Northern Europe 150-1500 CE: The Runic Corpus

Thursday 18 November 2020 16.00-18.00 CEST
Registration link: https://forms.gle/UkoswwEt1kRWpj4PA
The seminar presents researchers behind two major online databases of Runic inscriptions in Scandinavia and Europe, namely Marco Bianchi from Uppsala University, who oversees the Scandinavian Runic-Text Database and Christiane Zimmermann of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, associated with RuneS. Laurine Albris from University of Bergen offers an archaeological perspective on Runic inscriptions based on her work with Old Scandinavian personal names.

  • Laurine Albris
    Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow
    Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion
    University of Bergen
    sofie.l.albris@uib.no
  • Marco Bianchi
    Senior Lecturer
    Department of Scandinavian Languages
    Uppsala University
    marco.bianchi@nordiska.uu.se
  • Christiane Zimmermann
    Researcher
    Academy Project „RuneS“
    Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
    c.zimmermann@isfas.uni-kiel.de

Middle East 900 BCE-700 CE: Pre-Islamic Inscriptions from the Arabian Peninsula

Wednesday 9 December 2020 16.00-17.00 CEST
Registration link: https://forms.gle/j9kQPZGSu9uuThD17
In our final seminar for the autumn, Irene Rossi introduces the c. 10,000 inscriptions from the Pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula, including texts in Ancient South Arabian, Ancient North Arabian, Aramaic and Nabataean, based on her work as part of the Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-Islamic Inscriptions.

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