Events
June 2023
Workshop: Imag(in)ing Materiality
Imag(in)ing Materiality. German-Jewish Archives in the Digital Age
Jewish history and German-Jewish history in the modern era all the more so is shaped by the experience of – oftentimes forced – migration. Writers, scholars and thinkers have migrated and so have their papers – but not necessarily at the same times or to the same places. Researchers of German-Jewish intellectual history and...
Zwischen Hamburg und Jerusalem. Neue Einblicke in die deutsch-jüdischen Archive der Israelischen Nationalbibliothek
In Kooperation mit dem Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) / Exzellenzcluster „Understanding Written Artefacts“ der Universität Hamburg hat die National Library of Israel Ende 2022 die Katalogisierung und Digitalisierung von 24 deutsch-jüdischen Sammlungen und Nachlässen im Umfang von mehr als 700.000 Seiten abgeschlossen. Die öffentliche Abendveranstaltung im Rahmen der...
Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Mineralogy Meets Archaeology in Miletus
Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Lecture 1/4
Mineralogy Meets Archaeology in Miletus
Stylianos Aspiotis and Christof Berns
Chair: Anastasia Poliakova
The analysis of rock-based written artefacts, the most secure and widespread medium for transmitting knowledge through time, should not solely be confined to the message of the engraved text but also expand on the mineral-phase composition of the...
Informal Talk: Chiara Ruzzier
The Miniaturisation of the Latin Bible During the 13th Century: A Technical Challenge to Produce Portable Manuscripts
Dr Chiara Ruzzier (University of Namur/CNRS-IRHT)
The 13th century witnessed major changes in the history of the Latin Bible manuscripts. The most notable innovation was the portable Bible, made possible by the rapid development of a standardised production of one-volume Bibles...
Informal Talk: Natalia Filatkina
Multilingual Archives in Premodern Societies (MAPS)
Professor Dr Natalia Filatkina (Universität Hamburg)
Presentation of the MAPS project, a cooperation between Universität Hamburg and Leeds University, and call for an upcoming workshop in Hamburg. All interested in the topic or in future cooperation are invited.
Digital Lunch Seminar Series: How Ink Analysis Can Contribute to Uncover the History of a Vanished Library
Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Lecture 2/4
How Ink Analysis Can Contribute to Uncover the History of a Vanished Library
Claudia Colini and Konrad Hirschler
Chair: Olivier Bonnerot
At the end of the 18th century the Ottoman governor of the province of Sidon, Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār (d. 1804), founded in Acre a splendid endowment complex, including a vast library encompassing over 1,800 volumes...
Thursday Lecture: Professor Dr Lynn Rother
Tracing the Unknown: Learning from Provenance Data
Professor Dr Lynn Rother (Leuphana Universität Lüneburg)
Recent restitution and decolonization efforts have shown that provenance has emancipated itself from being a subordinate cataloging task in museums and the art market to a self-conscious scientific endeavor with ethical and legal implications. While the minutiae of ownership and...
Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Liturgica and Chronica from the Former Library of the St. Katharinenkirchen
Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Lecture 3/4
Liturgica and Chronica from the Former Library of the St. Katharinenkirchen in Hamburg in the Context of their Transmission
Ira Rabin and Katrin Janz-Wenig
Chair: Marina Creydt
The Katharinen project is dedicated to cataloguing 21 and digitizing 52 liturgical and chronical manuscripts dated to the 13th-17th centuries that are inherently connected with...
DL Workshop 2023
DL Workshop 2023: Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing – Challenges in the Humanities
The humanities meet computer science to create new synergies using computer vision and natural language processing.
Aim & Scope
Historians are increasingly using technologies to evaluate digitised texts in a machine-readable way, as well as techniques from the field of natural language...
Informal Talk: Sébastien Garnier
Manuscript Collections in Decentralised Regions: Research Challenges and Strategies for Overcoming These
Dr Sébastien Garnier Centre Jean Pépin (CNRS)
While centralised states and regions often have a focal or key repository for manuscripts and an overarching strategy for conserving written texts, decentralised political spaces are frequently characterised by heterogeneous approaches to text...
TAG: Name Writing in Public Space
The Tag Conference is the spearhead event in graffiti studies. This new instalment of the conference will gather over 20 speakers coming from 14 countries on all 5 continents, and feature a diverse range of views into different forms of tagging – from historical name-writing to contemporary urban tags.
All lectures are free and open to the public. Some talks will be delivered in German. The...
July 2023
Hamburgs Schriftschätze: Exhibition opening
The exhibition ‘Hamburgs Schriftschätze: Neue Fragen an alte Manuskripte’ shows highlights from the holdings of the Hamburg State Library, demonstrating how research at CSMC employs individual objects to develop overarching approaches to understanding written artefacts of all eras and places.
A 4000-year-old receipt for flour, written in cuneiform in clay; a complete Qur’an, only a few...
Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Investigating Paper Artefacts with Small and Wide Angle X-ray Scattering
Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Lecture 4/4
Investigating Paper Artefacts with Small and Wide Angle X-ray Scattering (SWAXS)
Agnieszka Helman-Wazny and Sylvio Haas
Chair: Stephan Seifert
The main challenge in the examination of a historic paper is its complexity. Papers contain a large number of components of different sorts, from different plant fibres to inorganic crystalline substances used...
UWA Summer School 2023: An Interdisciplinary History of Writing
How has writing shaped human societies and cultures and how have these, in turn, adapted writing to their needs?
This summer school takes up the central research questions of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures’ (UWA). In order to tackle these questions, the research on written artefacts follows a global and...
November 2023
Workshop: Meaning of Proportion
Meaning of Proportion: Extravagant Formats and Sizes of Manuscripts in the Tradition of Book Religions
Proportion and format can be considered as fundamental features of books, especially of manuscripts. Presently, though, this evidence seems to attract less attention, a trend seemingly due to the advancement of digitisation. In fact, the increased availability of visual material online, so...