Graphemics in the 21st Century Conference

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce a conference that may be of interest to our user community.

/gʁafematik/ 2018 is the first conference bringing together disciplines concerned with writing systems and their representation in written communication. The conference aims to reflect on the current state of research in the area, and on the role that writing and writing systems play in neighboring disciplines like computer science and information technology, communication, typography, psychology, and pedagogy. In particular it aims to study the effect of the growing importance of Unicode with regard to the future of reading and writing in human societies. Reflecting the richness of perspectives on writing systems, /gʁafematik/ is actively interdisciplinary, and welcomes proposals from researchers from the fields of computer science and information technology, linguistics, communication, pedagogy, psychology, history, and the social sciences.

/gʁafematik/ aims to create a space for the discussion of the range of approaches to writing systems, and specifically to bridge approaches in linguistics, informatics, and other fields. It will provide a forum for explorations in terminology, methodology, and theoretical approaches relating to the delineation of an emerging interdisciplinary area of research that intersects with intense activity in practical implementations of writing systems.

The conference will be held at IMT Atlantique (formerly Télécom Bretagne) at Brest, France, on June 14-16, 2018.

Topics will include:

• Epistemology of graphemics: history, onomastics, topics, interaction with other disciplines
• Foundations of graphemics
• History and typology of writing systems, comparative graphemics
• Semiotics of writing and of writing systems
• Computational/formal graphemics
• Graphemic theory of Unicode encoding

For more information, please consult:
http://conferences.telecom-bretagne.eu/grafematik/
https://twitter.com/grafematik2018e