I started my academic career in 1986 in the University of Lisbon when I was preparing my M.A. dissertation on the theme of the 18th century Portuguese orthography. The orthography topic had become more interesting in the mid 1980s because of a profound spelling reform that was about to be decided in the context of a Portuguese-Brazilian treaty. Public discussion of the announced reform made it very much apparent to the naked eye that collective imagination and transcendent beliefs do get stimulated when people start thinking about the meaning of writing traditions. I was studying Historical Linguistics and Textual Criticism under the supervision of Professor Ivo Castro, a philologist who was well aware of the socio-anthropological literature on written communication, so I tried to match, from the early years of my research, the philological expertise on manuscript and printed texts with the study of cultural contexts and cultural changes. My teaching practice, which also began in 1986 at the same University, led me to become specialized in Portuguese Language History. Like all language historians, I was always searching for manuscripts containing close-to-spoken data, especially data provided by non-élite speakers. Finding out that the Inquisition archives had kept, as instrumental proof within their thousands of lawsuits, numerous letters made by all sorts of letter-writers, I wrote my PhD dissertation based on the Inquisition sources. I called it The Faculty of the Letters and I proposed that 17th century Portuguese society had more literacy rates than expected in the catholic countries of the Ancien Régime times. Influenced by the perspective of Nouvelle Histoire, I tried to look at written artefacts made by ordinary people both as social practices, which the anthropological perspective can envisage per se, and as representations, which historical views can find extremely informative. The only obstacle about those artefacts was their hidden condition and the time-consuming process of their contextualization: only a team of fully employed researchers could scan the thousands of lawsuits, find their instrumental proofs, read the contents of the court investigations (the discourse of witnesses, defendants and prosecutors) and turn up with a machine-searchable, critical edition of the private letters. I managed to assemble a small team in 2007, when I received some national funding for the enterprise, and within three years we had 2,000 letters edited. In 2010 we started extending the research to 20th century private correspondence, a research also supported by national funding. The work in the archives was backed up by a running seminar, which I kept offering at the University of Lisbon, on the theme of “Language, Writing and Society”. In 2012 I was awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for the P.S. Post Scriptum project. Between 2012 and 2017 I coordinated the P.S. team: 15 researchers, eight of which were post-docs, assembled a corpus of two million tokens, based on original letter manuscripts and intended for the study of ordinary writing and ordinary language in Portugal and Spain along the Early Modern period. The project was a pioneering experience in the interdisciplinarity involving cultural history, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and the digital humanities. We developed a way of combining scholarly digital editions and annotated corpora and offered the public an original online resource: http://ps.clul.ul.pt. Here it is fully visible that writings can be ‘utterances’ for linguists, ‘texts’ for philologists, and ‘discourses’ for social scientists, but a new method is needed if you want the more complete approach of looking for the three things at the same time. I retired from teaching in 2018 and have been collaborating with running projects on Digital Humanities (SYNAPSE) and textual variation (Os Degraus do Parnaso) since then.