A biennial academic conference that convenes scholars from disciplines engaged with grapholinguistics and, more broadly, the systematic study of writing systems and their manifestation in written communication. The conference seeks to examine the current state of scholarship in this domain and to assess the significance of writing and writing systems within adjacent disciplines, including computer science, communication studies, linguistics, typography, psychology, and pedagogy. Of particular concern is the investigation of the expanding influence of Unicode and its implications for the future of literacy and textual practices in human societies.
Reflecting the diversity of scholarly perspectives on writing systems, G21C is fundamentally interdisciplinary in orientation. The conference welcomes submissions from researchers across information technology, language and communication studies, graphic communication, and the social sciences.
G21C endeavors to establish a forum for discourse on the varied approaches to writing systems, with particular emphasis on fostering dialogue between linguistic, informatic, and other disciplinary frameworks. The conference provides a venue for scholarly inquiry into terminology, methodology, and theoretical paradigms relevant to the delineation of an emerging interdisciplinary research area that intersects with substantial practical developments in writing system implementation.
The Theme: Entangled Scripts, Cultures, Disciplines
Entanglement operates at multiple levels in the study of writing. Scripts may be entangled within a single writing system—as in Japanese—or across different languages and, therefore, writing systems, as seen in multilingual documents and public signage. Such entanglements raise fundamental questions: How do scripts/writing systems interact graphically, linguistically, and semiotically?
Because scripts carry the cultural histories of the writing systems that use or have used them, script entanglement often triggers cultural entanglement. Yet the relationship is not unidirectional. Two cultures coexisting in shared physical or virtual spaces may deploy their respective scripts as markers of distinct identity—using writing not to entangle but to disentangle, to assert boundaries rather than dissolve them.
The concept of entanglement extends beyond scripts themselves. Since its inception in 2018, the / gʁafematik / conference has demonstrated that grapholinguistics is inherently entangled with multiple disciplines: linguistics, naturally, as its parent field, but also history, archaeology, paleography, typography, computer science, artificial intelligence, psychology, education sciences, and others. These disciplines do not merely coexist within the conference’s knowledge domain—they reach toward one another, interweaving their methods and insights in the study of that profoundly human act: reading and writing.
The Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century Conference receives endorsement from the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI).
[More information about tickets coming soon.]