On the State of Studying the Georgian Written Culture before and in the Digital Era

摘要

Georgia, like many other cultural countries, has passed a long way from the oral culture to the written one and now it has been on the stage of digital culture. This long way includes all aspects of social, intellectual or spiritual lives of Georgia and Georgian people. The goal of the research is to examine the state of exploring the Georgian written cultural heritage before and after emerging of the new technologies and show how much it is ready to overcome the challenges of the digital culture. The paper emphasizes that, alongside with the internal favorable conditions, the strong cultural links with the Eastern and Western countries in the ancient and Middle Ages conditioned the high level of the Georgian written culture. In the period of the Soviet era, the cultural and scientific dialogue with the West was interrupted, which was recovered after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since the 1990s, the new technologies created the new perspectives for research and the new challenges emerged before the Georgian scientists – to implement the technology-based methods in researches. By reviewing some scientific projects, carried out or running by the Georgian researchers, the paper sheds light on how the Georgian scientists overcame the existing problems and what problems they are facing in the epoch of digital culture.