Introducing Paleographemics

Every field begins when a question grows too large for its parent disciplines. Paleographemics is the study of writing in that moment of expansion—when paleography, epigraphy, linguistics, and computer science meet to ask new, shared questions about how scripts evolve.

Paleographemics focuses on the grapheme in motion: the letterform not as a static image but as something that changes across time, region, and material. It examines how shapes shift, how scribal habits migrate, and how alphabets adapt to new languages and tools. Where traditional paleography relies on typology and intuition, paleographemics introduces quantification—measuring graphical features such as curvature, junctions, aspect ratio, and complexity to compare and model forms systematically.

This approach builds on existing epigraphic and paleographic traditions rather than replacing them. It transforms long-standing qualitative insights into datasets that can be explored, visualized, and tested. Its methods draw from computer vision and network analysis, but its aims remain humanistic: to understand how people wrote, copied, and recognized letters, and what those visual decisions reveal about contact and continuity among cultures.

At its center is APEX—the Alphabetic Paleography Explorer—a platform designed to document and analyze letterforms across the ancient Mediterranean. APEX brings together inscriptions from museums, corpora, and archives into a unified, searchable, feature-extracted corpus. It offers both a research environment for specialists and a foundation for future large-scale analysis of script evolution.

Paleographemics invites collaboration among historians, linguists, archaeologists, and digital humanists. It values transparency, reproducibility, and the combination of quantitative and qualitative reasoning. Its goal is simple but far-reaching: to give scholars new ways to trace how writing changes—slowly, unevenly, and meaningfully—over time.

Welcome to Paleographemics: the science and art of how letters change.