This article has been subjected to double blind peer review

This article has been published in: Ocula 30, Visuality of writing in arts and visual communication

authors: Antonio Perri (Dipartimento di Scienze umanistiche, Università degli studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Napoli, IT), Luciano Perondi (Dipartimento Culture del progetto, Università Iuav di Venezia, IT) , Daniele Capo (CAST Società Cooperativa) , Roberto Arista (Typotheque) and Giampiero Dalai (Alpaca Società Cooperativa)

Alternative graphemics. Aztec writing system as a case study towards an integrated, digitalised model of non-typographic graphemics

language: english

abstract: Aztec pictographic writing conveys semantic (and linguistic) contents through conventional patterns of units. We argue that relevant visual values are ordered in subsets (topological, spatial and logical). Each unit is a “character” (in the Unicode vocabulary), either as a positive unit (a graphic sign) or as an “empty” spatial, topo-graphical relation between signs. It is sketched, then, a digital method processing sets of basic graphic features as non-linear combinations of variables; they display an overall structure similar to Unicode encoding of emoji. Finally, more coded variables are set to account for broader compositions, since coding systems available so far are not flexible enough to accommodate the encoding of Aztec units.

citation information: Antonio Perri, Luciano Perondi, Daniele Capo, Roberto Arista and Giampiero Dalai, Alternative graphemics. Aztec writing system as a case study towards an integrated, digitalised model of non-typographic graphemics, "Ocula", vol.25, n.30, pp.43-64, June 2024. DOI: 10.57576/ocula2024-5

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