J.R. Osborn is a scholar and experimentalist of communication. His work explores media history, semiotics, communication technologies, visual culture, and design aesthetics with a regional focus of the Middle East and Africa. Dr. Osborn is currently an Associate Professor of Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) and Co-Director of the Technology Design Studio and Iteration Lab at Georgetown University. He has written a number of articles on Arabic typography history, Ottoman printing, and the interactions of Arabic script and technology. His book Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design (2017, Harvard University Press) won the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Albert Hourani Best Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). The book follows the story of Arabic script and technology, from the advent of calligraphic tradition in the tenth century through the implementation of the Unicode computer standard in the twentieth century. Dr. Osborn also co-authored African Art Reframed: Dialogues and Reflections on Museum Culture (2020, University of Illinois Press), which analyzes the global circulation of African art through extensive curator interviews, ethnographic site visits, the “unmixing” of artworks, and studies of audience response. His latest project collects and analyzes significant diagrams from manuscripts and early printed works for the Diagrammatica archive.

“Whenever we enter a library, we are in conversation with the past. And like any new setting in which we are strangers, we must listen carefully if we wish to learn from those already present. In the case of libraries, and especially manuscript libraries, we must “listen” to what our teachers wrote as well as how they wrote: which pens did they use, which paper, which styles of script. I was honored by Tarık Tüten’s invitation to contribute to the current “Conversation,” which connects scholars of the past, present, and future. And I hope that my essay extends the visual appreciation of the Hafız Ahmed Ağa Library collection. Every manuscript speaks in a unique “voice,” and styles of script act like dialects: each style “speaks” with a distinct accent and tone. Throughout history, Arabic script has adopted different styles on different media for different audiences. Such diversity invites us to appreciate the communicative role of scribal and visual variety. It inspires a retrofuturology in which the exploration of past techniques suggests future possibilities.”

J.R. Osborn

* LETTERS OF LIGHT: ARABIC SCRIPT IN CALLIGRAPHY, PRINT, AND DIGITAL DESIGN By J. R. Osborn, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Revised by the author for Conversation in the Library.