An event and an article by Pippa

Pippa will be speaking at an online British School at Athens Friends lecture on Thursday 15th June, 17.00 BST (19.00 Greek time). Her topic is “The vitality of writing traditions in the Bronze Age Aegean and Iron Age Cyprus – and their unexpected relevance for the modern day”. This lecture will present research begun under …

Your Stories: Ainu, My long journey from Greek and chocolate eggs to cuneiform enthusiasm

It started with Greek. One of my (many) children’s books about Ancient Greek introduced the Greek alphabet, and I decided to learn it. I didn’t understand all the letters – how can “ps” be one letter? – so I decided to use these extra letters for sounds my mother tongue Finnish has but Greek is …

VIEWS at the Classical Association conference

In April I gave a paper at the Classical Association conference, which is one of the big yearly conferences in Classics and is attended by not only academics in university education and research but also by many schoolteachers working in classical subjects - so a great opportunity to 'network', and to talk to friends old …

Your Stories: Jordan Williams, Spirit Writer and Nsibidi Advocate

My name is Jordan Williams, a 21-year-old undergrad majoring in Digital Media Innovation with a focus on web/mobile development, and minoring in Chinese/Japanese. As a language enthusiast and researcher, I have always been fascinated by the intricacies of ideographic writing systems, especially those found in Chinese and Nsibidi. My interest in Nsibidi led me to …

Hybrid seminar by VIEWS Visiting Fellow Aaron Koller

On 12th June we are holding the first ever VIEWS seminar, which will be in hybrid format - in person for anyone in Cambridge, with attendance by zoom for anyone elsewhere. All are welcome! (This is the first time I have run a hybrid seminar, so zoom followers please bear with me as I attempt …

Join the VIEWS team

We have two opportunities to join the VIEWS team open at the moment: one for a PhD student working on visual aspects of the Bronze Age Aegean scripts (full funding available for UK students; deadline 16th May), and one for a Research Associate working on a social archaeology of cursive writing (primary focus Phoenician, with …

Endangered Writing Network – new developments

I am pleased to report that the Endangered Writing Network is already doing well, with lots of new members and growing discussion on the Discord server. Anyone can join by visiting the Network main page and filling out the contact form - all you need is an interest in writing traditions ancient and/or modern, endangerment …

Your Stories: Oreen Yousuf, Harari speaker

My name is Oreen Yousuf and I'm an engineer that focuses on natural language processing (NLP). I'm also incredibly fascinated by the diversity of writing systems used in the world (both past and present). I speak Harari which is a small Ethio-Semitic language that is written in the Ge'ez/Ethiopic script. However, I was born outside …

Introducing our first new VIEWS researcher

Hello! My name is Jordan and I’m thrilled to be joining the VIEWS Project as a Research Associate working on Egyptian and Maya writing. I specialize in the religion and visual culture of ancient Egypt, and my research is guided by what are essentially anthropological questions: what did ancient Egyptians consider as ‘beings’ (termed ‘metapersons’ …

Writing and language rights

This post is specially written for Global Language Advocacy Day 2023 (#GLAD23), an international day highlighting the importance and diversity of languages across the world. This year's theme is "Language rights save lives" - in both literal and metaphorical senses. One important strand of the VIEWS project involves using our research on early writing systems …