Grace Elizabeth Shallit Lecture

Tuesday, February 24th at 3:00pm, HBLL Auditorium

Dr. Steven Houston, professor at Brown University and the 2009 Grace Elizabeth Shallit Lecturer, will present "Beyond Script: Notation and Memory at the Margins of Writing," a lecture discussing graphic notations that lie outside conventional writing systems.

Abstract

Writing is often understood to include the graphic systems that encode and reflect speech. Those systems are familiar to scholars, who, for some centuries, have addressed the origins, development, setting, and extinction of writing in a wide variety of times and places. What lie outside conventional study are the graphic notations that do not clearly express speech--the notches, threads, scratches, potter's and mason's marks, the tally sticks of the Middle Ages and the Caribbean banana boat, all of which invade, trigger, and mold memory through well-developed systems of meaning and practice. Because of their ubiquity and broad application, these, too, deserve fresh review, and a reintroduction into the study of human expression.