Project description

"My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant” (The Little Prince, I). We see what we are prone to seeing: how many essential features does an image need to show to be understood unambiguously and communicate its message correctly? Images, symbols, icons, ideographs: these are all means of visual communication. To be successfully decoded, visual codes need both parties to be within the context where these codes are deployed: it is a trade-off between mind and materiality. An insightful example of a successful negotiation between mind and materiality is early writing, characterised by highly pictographic and ideographic aspects. Ideograms (i.e. symbols representing ideas or objects) tell us about how the human mind understands and interacts with the external world. My Project aims to explore ideography through time (creation methods, transmission dynamics, applications, implications) by comparing a pre-modern context (Bronze Age Aegean ‘early’ writing, 2^nd millennium BC) with contemporary examples (e.g. icons, symbols, signage, emojis/emoticons). Both contexts will be investigated interdisciplinarily by combining approaches taken from linguistics, arts and graphic design, archaeology and anthropology, architecture, cognitive and social sciences, leading to an assessment of the implications of this phenomenon: which implications did ideography have for the workings of past societies and which implications does it have for contemporary communication? Can such an investigation inform future communication dynamics?

Short Bio

I specialise in Bronze Age Aegean Scripts: my work integrates archaeology, linguistics, epigraphy, palaeography and ancient history, and uses scripts (in their material and cognitive aspects) as a heuristic tool to investigate and reconstruct contemporary socio-cultural dynamics. My PhD dissertation (2018, University of Cambridge) is published as a monograph: Aegean Linear Script(s): Rethinking the Relationship between Linear A and Linear B (Cambridge University Press, 2020). After my PhD, I was Junior Research Fellow (2018-2022) at St John’s College and Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics (University of Cambridge). I then joined the INSCRIBE Project (University of Bologna) as a Post-doctoral Researcher.