The Urban Script

The Urban Script PDF Author: Shu Fan Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Deciphering the Indus Script

Deciphering the Indus Script PDF Author: Asko Parpola
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521795661
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Of the writing systems of the ancient world which still await deciphering, the Indus script is the most important. It developed in the Indus or Harappan Civilization, which flourished c. 2500-1900 BC in and around modern Pakistan, collapsing before the earliest historical records of South Asia were composed. Nearly 4,000 samples of the writing survive, mainly on stamp seals and amulets, but no translations. Professor Parpola is the chief editor of the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions. His ideas about the script, the linguistic affinity of the Harappan language, and the nature of the Indus religion are informed by a remarkable command of Aryan, Dravidian, and Mesopotamian sources, archaeological materials, and linguistic methodology. His fascinating study confirms that the Indus script was logo-syllabic, and that the Indus language belonged to the Dravidian family.

The Metainterface

The Metainterface PDF Author: Christian Ulrik Andersen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262549670
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
How the interface has moved from the PC into cultural platforms, as seen in a series of works of net art, software art and electronic literature. The computer interface is both omnipresent and invisible, at once embedded in everyday objects and characterized by hidden exchanges of information between objects. The interface has moved from office into culture, with devices, apps, the cloud, and data streams as new cultural platforms. In The Metainterface, Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold examine the relationships between art and interfaces, tracing the interface's disruption of everyday cultural practices. They present a new interface paradigm of cloud services, smartphones, and data capture, and examine how particular art forms—including net art, software art, and electronic literature—seek to reflect and explore this paradigm. Andersen and Pold argue that despite attempts to make the interface disappear into smooth access and smart interaction, it gradually resurfaces; there is a metainterface to the displaced interface. Art can help us see this; the interface can be an important outlet for aesthetic critique. Andersen and Pold describe the “semantic capitalism” of a metainterface industry that captures user behavior; the metainterface industry's disruption of everyday urban life, changing how the city is read, inhabited, and organized; the ways that the material displacement of the cloud affects the experience of the interface; and the potential of designing with an awareness of the language and grammar of interfaces.

Script and Society

Script and Society PDF Author: Philip J. Boyes
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789255864
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
By the 13th century BC, the Syrian city of Ugarit hosted an extremely diverse range of writing practices. As well as two main scripts – alphabetic and logographic cuneiform - the site has also produced inscriptions in a wide range of scripts and languages, including Hurrian, Sumerian, Hittite, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Luwian hieroglyphs and Cypro-Minoan. This variety in script and language is accompanied by writing practices that blend influences from Mesopotamian, Anatolian and Levantine traditions together with what seem to be distinctive local innovations. Script and Society: The Social Context of Writing Practices in Late Bronze Age Ugarit explores the social and cultural context of these complex writing traditions from the perspective of writing as a social practice. It combines archaeology, epigraphy, history and anthropology to present a highly interdisciplinary exploration of social questions relating to writing at the site, including matters of gender, ethnicity, status and other forms of identity, the relationship between writing and place, and the complex relationships between inscribed and uninscribed objects. This forms a case- study for a wider discussion of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of writing practices in the ancient world.

Charting Literary Urban Studies

Charting Literary Urban Studies PDF Author: Jens Martin Gurr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000336018
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representations of the city and as blueprints for its future development. The study addresses questions such as these: How do literary texts represent urban complexities – and how can they capture the uniqueness of a given city? How do literary texts simulate layers of urban memory – and how can they reinforce or help dissolve path dependencies in urban development? What role can literary studies play in interdisciplinary urban research? Are the blueprints or 'recipes' for urban development that most quickly travel around the globe – such as the 'creative city', the 'green city' or the 'smart city' – really always the ones that best solve a given problem? Or is the global spread of such travelling urban models not least a matter of their narrative packaging? In answering these key questions, this book also advances a literary studies contribution to the general theory of models, tracing a heuristic trajectory from the analysis of literary texts as representations of urban developments to an analysis of literary strategies in planning documents and other pragmatic, non-literary texts.

Writing Signs

Writing Signs PDF Author: Irene A. Bierman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520918788
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Irene Bierman explores the complex relationship between alphabet and language as well as the ways the two elements are socially defined by time and place. She focuses her exploration on the Eastern Mediterranean in the sixth through twelfth centuries, notably Cairo's Fatimid dynasty of 969-1171. Examining the inscriptions on Fatimid architecture and textiles, Bierman offers insight into all elements of that society, from religion to the economy, and the enormous changes the dynasty underwent during that period. Bierman addresses fundamental issues of what buildings mean, how inscriptions affect that meaning, and the role of written messages and the ceremonies into which they are incorporated in service of propagandist goals. Her method and conclusions provide a pioneering model for studying public writing in other societies and offer powerful evidence to show that writing is a highly charged and deeply embedded social practice.

Rem Koolhaas as Scriptwriter

Rem Koolhaas as Scriptwriter PDF Author: Helena Huber-Doudová
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000984265
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book is the first survey of a new field in architecture theory: script writing. Rem Koolhaas as Scriptwriter explores the intersection of architecture, film, and text using the example of the working method of scriptwriter, Rem Koolhaas, and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). This book argues that Koolhaas formulates his approach to architecture on the basis of the “written sketch” or script, and questions its transformations into built environment in the oeuvre of OMA. Divided into two parts, the first part is a theoretical outline that explores the notion of scriptwriting in film. It provides in-depth insights into the definition and historical evolution of the script—as a blueprint, Hollywood script, avant-garde script, storyboard, the relation to auteur theory, and the difference between the script and scenario. It surveys the first original script for the Exodus, of the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. The second part offers a unique perspective on the urban development of West Berlin, in which Koolhaas created a metropolitan script, or blueprint, that spans the period 1971–1989, from his first visit to Berlin to the fall of the Berlin Wall. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of architectural theory, urban history, and film studies.

Resources in Education

Resources in Education PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 1170

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Before Writing, Vol. I

Before Writing, Vol. I PDF Author: Denise Schmandt-Besserat
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292707832
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols. In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens—small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay—represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device. In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.

The World's Writing Systems

The World's Writing Systems PDF Author: Peter T. Daniels
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195079930
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 970

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Book Description
Ranging from cuneiform to shorthand, from archaic Greek to modern Chinese, from Old Persian to modern Cherokee, this is the only available work in English to cover all of the world's writing systems from ancient times to the present. Describing scores of scripts in use now or in the past around the world, this unusually comprehensive reference offers a detailed exploration of the history and typology of writing systems. More than eighty articles by scholars from over a dozen countries explain and document how a vast array of writing systems work--how alphabets, ideograms, pictographs, and hieroglyphics convey meaning in graphic form. The work is organized in thirteen parts, each dealing with a particular group of writing systems defined historically, geographically, or conceptually. Arranged according to the chronological development of writing systems and their historical relationships within geographical areas, the scripts are divided into the following sections: the ancient Near East, East Asia, Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Additional parts address the ongoing process of decipherment of ancient writing systems; the adaptation of traditional scripts to new languages; new scripts invented in modern times; and graphic symbols for numerical, music, and movement notation. Each part begins with an introductory article providing the social and cultural context in which the group of writing systems was developed. Articles on individual scripts detail the historical origin of the writing system, its structure (with tables showing the forms of the written symbols), and its relationship to the phonology of the corresponding spoken language. Each writing system is illustrated by a passage of text, and accompanied by a romanized version, a phonetic transcription, and a modern English translation. A bibliography suggesting further reading concludes each entry. Matched by no other work in English, The World's Writing Systems is the only comprehensive resource covering every major writing system. Unparalleled in its scope and unique in its coverage of the way scripts relate to the languages they represent, this is a resource that anyone with an interest in language will want to own, and one that should be a part of every library's reference collection.

Writing and the Ancient State

Writing and the Ancient State PDF Author: Haicheng Wang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107028124
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
Writing and the Ancient State is a comparative study of the use of writing to create and maintain order in early states.