CSMC News

20 January 2025|CSMC News

The Second Digital Life of a Guestbook

Photo: Sebastian Schirrmeister

The Jerusalem guestbook of Miryam and Moshe Ya’akov Ben-Gavriêl is a small object of only 200 pages – yet it opens doors to more stories than a single researcher can uncover. Sebastian Schirrmeister wants to use new digital techniques to explore this microcosm and link it to larger bodies of...

16 January 2025|CSMC News

TV Documentary Shows Investigations into the ‘Mummy Book’

Photo: ORF

A TV documentary spotlights the spectacular case of the ‘Mummy Book’ – the supposedly oldest codex fragment in the world, found in Graz in 2023. It also shows the investigations of the object at the CSMC, which play a crucial role in clarifying the open questions surrounding the ‘Mummy Book’.

13 January 2025|CSMC News

Mobile Lab Team Back from Italian Journey

Photo: CSMC

For our Mobile Lab, the turn of the year 2024/2025 was marked by tour de force through northern Italy. In changing formation, the team spent several weeks in Venice and Verona, examining a series of spectacular objects in famous museums and libraries.

9 January 2025|CSMC News

Genealogical Manuscripts in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Photo: De Gruyter

Across time and space, and for a range of reasons and motives, humans have been establishing practices and media for cultivating and presenting knowledge about past and present kin. The new volume of SMC is about one of the most important material manifestations of this knowledge: handwritten...

8 January 2025|CSMC News

Mysterious Damage: Valuable Manuscripts from Kairouan, Tunisia Analysed in Hamburg

Photo: CSMC

Numerous artefacts from one of the world’s most important collections of Islamic manuscripts are affected by an unusual form of degradation. In late 2024, a delegation from Tunisia brought 15 objects to Hamburg and analysed them together with the experts of the Artefact Lab at the Centre for the...

6 January 2025|CSMC News

‘Researchers Should be Transparent about Open Questions’

Photo: Leila Amineddoleh

How should researchers deal with objects of unclear provenance? As a lawyer, teacher, and scholar specialising in art and cultural heritage law, Leila Amineddoleh offers expert advice on this issue. In our interview, she talks about the most common questions researchers ask her.

20 December 2024|CSMC News

Miruna Belea and Xuan Tran Thi Successfully Defend their PhD Dissertations

Photo: CSMC

Just before the end of the year, two more PhD researchers from the CSMC Graduate School have completed their doctoral projects: Miruna Belea defended her dissertation in Jewish Studies and Xuan Tran Thi in Sinology. Congratulations!

19 December 2024|CSMC News

Producing Buddhist Sutras in Ninth-Century Tibet

Photo: De Gruyter

Studying the 1,500 Dunhuang copies of the ‘Sutra of Limitless Life’ in the British Library seems tedious. However, in the new volume of SMC, Brandon Dotson and Lewis Doney show that examining a large set of seemingly interchangeable manuscripts can reveal numerous fascinating issues.

18 December 2024|CSMC News

‘In the End, it’s Always about Closing Knowledge Gaps’

Photo: Mahdi Jampour

Robots, Covid-19, agriculture, Georgian palimpsests – AI scientist Mahdi Jampour has already dealt with a colourful range of topics in his career. In this interview, he talks about his background and his current research at the CSMC.

5 December 2024|CSMC News

Eliana dal Sasso and Simon Schiff Successfully Defend their PhD Dissertations

Photo: CSMC

Congratulations to Eliana dal Sasso and Simon Schiff! Both of them recently defended their PhD dissertations in Egyptology and Computer Science, respectively.

4 December 2024|CSMC News

Removed and Rewritten: New SMC Volume on Palimpsests

Photo: De Gruyter

Recovering hidden texts on palimpsests has been a challenge for manuscript researchers for centuries. While the focus has long been restricted to ancient or medieval parchment manuscripts, the new SMC volume shows how much richer the topic of palimpsests is when viewed from a cross-cultural...

3 December 2024|CSMC News

Researchers from Bangalore Visit the CSMC

Photo: CSMC

To clarify the provenance of historical palm-leaf manuscripts in India, CSMC researchers are working with the National Institute for Advanced Studies in Bangalore. A three-member delegation from NIAS recently visited Hamburg to familiarise themselves with the equipment and methods of the Artefact...

2 December 2024|CSMC News

Now Available in Arabic: Guidelines for Writing a Disaster Preparedness Plan

Photo: CSMC

The open-access volume of our ‘Written Artefacts as Cultural Heritage’ series that supports small museums in writing a suitable disaster preparedness plan is now also available in Arabic translation.

25 November 2024|CSMC News

“Die Temperamente des Theaters”: A Digital Tour of the Exhibition

Photo: SUB Hamburg

In October, UWA presented an exhibition at SUB Hamburg highlighting a little-known piece of German theatre history: the staging books of Leopold Jessner, one of the most important directors of the Weimar Republic, from his time at the Thalia Theatre. The exhibition can now be experienced digitally.

22 November 2024|CSMC News

Final Episode: Written Artefacts of Nepal

Nepal is home to exceptionally diverse manuscript collections, both in terms of scripts and languages as well as materials used. In the final episode of his video series, Bidur Bhattarai introduces the manuscript collection of the Bhatta family at Changu Narayan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

20 November 2024|CSMC News

New Volume of ‚manuscript cultures‘ Out Now

Photo: CSMC

The recent volume of ‚manuscript cultures‘ unveils remarkable aspects of a multiple-text collection by Ẓahīr al-Dīn Mīrzā Muḥammad Ibrāhīm, a Safavid governor of Azerbaijan in the 17th century and an influential member of the courtly elite who also wrote texts and compiled books.

4 November 2024|CSMC News

Humanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence

Photo: Gwen Melzer

Bridging the gap between computer science and the humanities is the central tenet of the workshop ‘Humanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence’ (CHAI). The proceedings of the fourth edition of this workshop, held in Würzburg in September 2024, are now available open access.

29 October 2024|CSMC News

The Material Culture of Initiation Rites

Photo: Royal Collection Trust

Initiation rites have shaped societies for thousands of years. Many of them involve written artefacts that are necessary to perform the ritual acts. The recently published volume on ‘Written Artefacts in Rites of Passage’ explores the material culture of initiation rites.

24 October 2024|CSMC News

New MA Students Get Going

Photo: Karsten Helmholz

With the beginning of the winter semester, a new cohort of students has started studying the MA programme ‘Manuscript Cultures’ at our Graduate School. With its equal share of modules in the humanities and the natural sciences, the programme is unique in Germany.

23 October 2024|CSMC News

The Life Cycle of Manuscripts

Photo: Research and Conservation Center for Unearthed Texts, Tsinghua University

An international conference in Beijing addressed ‘The Life Cycle of Manuscripts: The Ethics and Practice of Acquiring, Preserving, and Accessing Global Heritage’. Among the invited experts from the UK, Ireland, Germany, Ukraine, Hungary, and other countries was Markus Fischer from the CSMC.

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