Reflections and predictions of technology's effect on reading and writing

In Avatars of the Word, O'Donnell reinterprets today's communication revolution through a series of refracted comparisons with earlier revolutionary periods: from the papyrus scroll to the codex and from copied manuscript to print.

The volume collects papers presented at the International Conference "Greek Medical Papyri - Text, Context, Hypertext" held at the University of Parma on November 2-4, 2016, as the final event of the ERC project DIGMEDTEXT, aimed primarily at creating an online textual database of the Greek papyri dealing with medicine. The contributions, authored by outstanding papyrologists and historians of the ancient medicine, deal with a variety of topics focused on the papyrological evidence of ancient medical texts and contexts. The first part, devoted to "medical texts", contains some new reflections on important sources such as the Anonymus Londinensis and the Hippocratic corpus, as well as on specific themes like the pharmacological vocabulary, the official medical reports, the medical care in the Roman army. The second part collects papers about the "doctors' context", providing highlights from broader viewpoints like the analysis of the writing supports, the study of the ostraka from the Eastern Desert, the evidence of inscriptions and philosophical texts. The third part is entirely focused on the DIGMEDTEXT project itself: the team members present some relevant key issues raised by the digitisation of the medical papyri.

This volume provides the first comprehensive introduction to the intersections between Christianity and the digital humanities. DH is a well-established, fast-growing, multidisciplinary field producing computational applications and analytical models to enable new kinds of research. Scholars of Christianity were among the first pioneers to explore these possibilities, using digital approaches to transform the study of Christian texts, history and ideas, and innovative work is taking place today all over the world. This volume aims to celebrate and continue that legacy by bringing together 15 of the most exciting contemporary projects, grouped into four categories. “Canon, corpus and manuscript” examines physical texts and collections. “Words and meanings” explores digital approaches to language and linguistics. “Digital history” uses digital techniques to explore the Christian past, and “Theology and pedagogy” engages with digital approaches to teaching, formation and Christian ideas. This volume introduces key debates, shares exciting initiatives, and aims to encourage new innovations in analysis and communication. Christianity and the Digital Humanities is ideally suited as a starting point for students and researchers interested in this vast and complex field.

Asserting that written language is on the verge of its greatest change since the advent of the printing press, visual artist Craig McDaniel and art historian Jean Robertson bring us Spellbound – a collection of heavily illustrated essays that interrogate assumptions about language and typography. Rethinking the alphabet, they argue, means rethinking human communication. Looking beyond traditional typography, the authors conceive of new languages in which encoded pictorial images offer an unparalleled fusion of art and language. In a world of constant technological innovation offered by e-books, tablets, cell phones and the Internet, McDaniel and Robertson demonstrate provocatively what it would mean to move beyond the alphabet we know to a wholly new system of written communication.

Since the very beginnings of the digital humanities, Papyrology has been in the vanguard of the application of information technologies to its own scientific purposes, for both theoretical and practical reasons (the strong awareness towards the problems of human memory and the material ways of preserving it; the need to work with a multifarious and overwhelming amount of different data). After more than thirty years of development, we have now at our disposal the most advanced tools to make papyrological studies more and more effective, and even to create a new conception of "papyrology" and a new model of "edition" of the ancient documents. At this turining point, it is important to build an epistemological framework including all the different expressions of Digital Papyrology, to trace a historical sketch setting the background of the contemporary tools, and to provide a clear overview of the current theoretical and technological trends, so that all the possibilities currently available can be exploited following uniform pathways. The volume represents an innovative attempt to deal with such topics, usually relegated into very quick and general treatments within journal articles or papyrological handbooks.

Ancient texts, once written by hand on parchment and papyrus, are now increasingly discoverable online in newly digitized editions, and their readers now work online as well as in traditional libraries. So what does this mean for how scholars may now engage with these texts, and for how the disciplines of biblical, Jewish and Christian studies might develop? These are the questions that contributors to this volume address. Subjects discussed include textual criticism, palaeography, philology, the nature of ancient monotheism, and how new tools and resources such as blogs, wikis, databases and digital publications may transform the ways in which contemporary scholars engage with historical sources. Contributors attest to the emergence of a conscious recognition of something new in the way that we may now study ancient writings, and the possibilities that this new awareness raises.