ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

GRAPHICS AND TEXT TWENTY YEAR LATER-2: Diagrams, Figures, Plans And Graffiti In Translation

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Almost twenty years ago, Francesca Bray co-edited, with V. Dorofeeva-Lichtmann and G. Métailié, Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China. The Warp and the Weft (Leiden, 2007). The goal of the book was to “focus on tu 圖, technical images, and on their relationship with written text in the production of technical knowledge.” The book represented the first systematic attempt to examine the part played by visual entities in the context of knowledge activities in China. This symposium, organised in honour of Francesca Bray, aims to present new developments in our knowledge of this topic as well as to consider what we could gain from broadening our focus to include East Asia and beyond. One of its goals is to examine how the type of diagrammatic and figurative elements used and the practices with which they are employed can help us distinguish between different local knowledge cultures. We are equally interested in detecting transformations in this respect, be these transformations due to a change in knowledge practice, or an appropriation in a different context, or even variations intended to accommodate different types of users or readers.
The second session of the symposium focuses on how diagrams, figures and other graphical elements are used and appropriated in the circulation of knowledge across contexts. The first talk examines the process of introduction of new graphical devices together with a new type of knowledge into China and their ensuing transformations to acculturate them to local practices. Conversely, the second talk examines the appropriation and transformation of mathematical diagrams from Chinese texts into Japan. The final talk deals with the part played by all kinds of graphical elements that were introduced into the first dictionaries of the Chinese language prepared by European missionaries.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Karine C. C. Chemla, University of Edinburgh and SPHERE, CNRS-UPC

Commentator

• Michael Lackner, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Individual Presentations

• Horoscopic Diagrams in China: From the Eighth to the Seventeenth Centuries - Jeffrey Kotyk, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

• Geometrical diagrams in traditional Chinese and Japanese mathematics - Alexei Volkov

• Beyond China: Visual Elements in Sino-European dictionaries (17th-18th centuries). - Michela BUSSOTTI, EFEO Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient / UMR CCJ

Session Organizer

• Karine C. C. Chemla, University of Edinburgh and SPHERE, CNRS-UPC