Conferences> Writing for the Artefact
Writing for the Artefact
A symposium on text, artefact and the human sign-maker
Deecember 2025, University of Copenhagen
The relationship between writing and the material surface on which it appears has proven difficult to explain. Textual scholarship in general, and traditional philology in particular, have often favored the abstract text over the material substrate, treating the artefact as a vehicle for texts rather than as an integral part of communication. In contrast, artefactual philology (e.g., Driscoll 2010, Hansen 2017, Kapitan et al. 2019) approaches ‘the whole book’ within its socio-cultural and historical context, shaped by the practices of writing, reading, and use. Yet, despite this shift, artefactual philology has lacked a robust theory of communication or writing capable of accounting for its own premises.
Unrelated to the ‘material’ turn in philology, integrational linguistics (e.g., Harris 1981, 1996, 1998; Pablé and Hutton 2015) has provided a general theory of writing (Harris 1984, 1995, 2000), based on a theory of human communication by means of signs (semiology). Integrational theory provides a powerful framework for understanding how texts are physically and communicatively constituted through the interplay of material form and social practice. It emphasizes the agency of the textualizer—writer, reader, scribe, printer, etc.—as a communicating participant, presenting a counterpoint to traditional notions of fixed textual meaning and editorial authority. Like artefactual philology, it considers the relationship between text and artefact as one of complementary contextualization; writing is contextualized by the artefact and vice versa, implying that they cannot be divorced. Thus, both approaches agree that textualization itself is a process that physically integrates text and artefact.
The symposium Writing for the Artefact aims to bring these two previously independent but congenial fields of research into dialogue to explore and utilize their synergetic potential for textual scholarship. Organized by the research group Textual Scholarship, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, sponsored by the International Association for the Integrational Study of Language & Communication (IAISLC).
References
Driscoll, Matthew James. 2010. “The words on the page: Thoughts on philology, old and new.” Pp. 87-104 in Creating the medieval saga: Versions, variability, and editorial interpretations of Old Norse saga literature, edited by Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark.
Hansen, Anne Mette. 2017. “The body language of text: The relationship between the textual content and the physical appearance of text in the p rocess of transmission (scholarly editing).” Pp. 57-82 in Creativity and Continuity. Perspectives on the Dynamics of Language Conventionalisation, edited by Dorthe Duncker and Bettina Perregaard. Copenhagen: U Press.
Harris, Roy. 1981. The Language Myth. London: Duckworth.
—. 1984. “The semiology of textualization.” Language Sciences 6(2):271-86.
—. 1995. Signs of Writing. London and New York: Routledge.
—. 1996. Signs, Language and Communication. London and New York: Routledge.
—. 1998. Introduction to Integrational Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon.
—. 2000. Rethinking Writing. London and New York: Continuum.
Katarzyna Anna Kapitan, Beeke Stegman, Seán D. Vrieland (Eds.). 2019. From Text to Artefact. Studies in Honour of Anne Mette Hansen. Leeds: Kismet Press.
Pablé, Adrian, and Christopher Hutton. 2015. Signs, Meaning and Experience: Integrational Approaches to Linguistics and Semiotics. Boston and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
