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Ceu Teaching Development Grants CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS REPORTING FORM 1. Title of the teaching development project Experimental Written Culture 2. Start and end dates of the project Winter term 2018/19 3. Short narrative account of the activities undertaken and results of the project. (approx. 2 pages). Please describe the questions or issues you investigated, activities undertaken, and observations and reflections about what you discovered. Please focus on specific concrete activities and observations. You may also wish to describe any changes or on-going experimentation you are planning to incorporate into your teaching as a result of this project. (Please enclose any documents, including assignments or student work, if appropriate and available). At the end of this term I have taught twice a class called ‘Gospels, Graffiti, Grocery Lists: Writing Culture an its Material Evidence in Antiquity and the Middle Ages’ as a mandatory elective class on ‘Written Culture’ for our Cultural Heritage Program. After teaching the class for the first time last year, I encountered the problem that certain notions in scholarship about advantages or disadvantages of the writing materials used, were partially inconsistent or contradictory, and made me curious to understand better the material evidence for myself – and thereby also to teach students from first-hand knowledge. As a very few specialized shops do offer ancient and medieval writing material, I saw the chance to revive ancient and medieval writing techniques to experiment with my students together in order to understand how writing worked in different cultures and at different times. For obvious reasons, inscriptions on stones as well as on/in clay had to be excluded but writing on wood, wax, papyri and parchment with stylus (on wax), reed (on papyri), reed pen (wood) and quill (on parchment) with three different inks was a full success! Wax tablets were the ‘notebooks’ of the ancient world, and students were easily able to write texts with a metal ‘stylus’ on the wax tablets. They could easily be re-used by flattening the wax again. This was actually a failure (the only one throughout the course) as even though I had also ordered a metal ‘spatula’, we were unable to straighten out the (cold) wax but would rather start to scratch off the wax. Maybe it would help to slightly warm up the tablet? I don’t know yet as I haven’t encountered this problem in the literature. Wooden tablets are mentioned by Martial and other Roman authors but only after archaeologists found wooden tablets in Vindolanda (at the Hadrian’s wall in Northern Britain since the 1960/70s), did scholars take this writing material serious: it was cheap, probably mass-produced, and easy to mail as letters. Students used the different types of ancient ink that I brought to class and wrote on the wooden tablets. That went surprisingly easy – for short texts or letters, is certainly was an ideal writing material. The same holds true for papyri: easy to use and easy to write on. However, here we know from the textbooks that papyri were only used on one side whereas the back was hardly ever used for text. Why? Because of its texture – the way papyrus is produced: stripes of papyri are laid down side by side with their edges slightly overlapping, and then another layer of stripes is laid on top in a right angle. This way, you only write in one direction without resistance by the material but if you write on the CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS Reporting Form back you feel the resistance of the stripes that are laid at a right angle to your way of writing…. The production of papyri was actually a highlight of the class: I had not only ordered a few papyri to write on but stripes that we had to moisturize in water, then lay out as described above, and let them dry (under pressure) for a week so that the stripes would glue together (we added a little extra glue in the water!) to become a papyrus paper! And yes, it worked! The result was not as pretty as the papyri I had ordered or the papyri you find in the textbooks but we were pretty satisfied. The most difficult writing material was parchment: it is much more difficult to write on it than on wood or papyri. This was actually an unexpected result of the class. In the end, it looks beautiful, and parchment does not soak in the ink like wood or papyri but it takes much more time to write a text down as the material resists writing (at least the parchment we used – obviously, parchment is not like parchment as we discussed in class, and today scholars analyze manuscripts also according what animals were used for the production of these manuscripts). We also tried to wash off the ink from papyri and parchment because some scholars claimed that this is possible but we were unable to do so. The washing off showed another characteristic of parchment: it is extremely sensitive to wetness, and damages it texture for good. This is obviously a well-known fact from the textbooks but it was nevertheless fascinating to see how quickly the parchment changed when we slightly attempted to wash off the dried ink. Overall, the usage of the material proved to be a full success – not only loved by the students but also very educational as we were actually able to understand the usage as well as advantages and disadvantages of different writing materials for ourselves! The students unanimously agreed that the ‘experimental writing culture’ improved their understanding of writing cultures. See pictures attached! 4. Brief description of the planned or occurring project dissemination activities My students spread both pictures as well as videos on social media. As the implementation of ‘Experimental Written Culture’ worked very well, I intend to include the experimental part of this class again next academic year. I would probably even try to produce ink myself as well as there are ‘recipes’ online, and I was told that this is not that difficult. Also, next time I may have more focus on the different writings styles/different scripts that were employed for different materials. 5. If your project was reviewed by the CEU Ethical Research Committee or other Review Board: Did you deviate from the original methods reviewed and accepted? If so, why? 6. Other comments (including explanation for any possible deviation from the original budget) CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS Reporting Form a) writing on wood with a reed pen CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS Reporting Form b) writing on a wax tablet with a stylus CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS Reporting Form c) Making papyri CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS Reporting Form d) Making papyri CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS Reporting Form e) Making papyri CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS Reporting Form CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS Reporting Form f) Making papyri g) Writing on Papyri with reed h) having produced our own papyri! CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS Reporting Form i) having produced our own papyri CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS Reporting Form j) not perfect but pretty good for a first attempt! CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS Reporting Form k) writing on parchment with a quill CEU TEACHING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS Reporting Form .
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