More than 160 participantsThis Week: UWA Conference 2023

25 September 2023

From 27 to 29 September 2023, the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ (UWA) gathers experts from all over the world in Hamburg for its most comprehensive conference on manuscript research to date. One focus will be on ethical issues in dealing with written artefacts.

Many written artefacts are irreplaceable evidence of earlier cultures. Researchers are often confronted with ethical questions concerning the handling of the artefacts themselves, the research data, and the communities that produced these artefacts. As part of the Cluster conference ‘Studying Written Artefacts: Challenges and Perspectives’ from 27-29 September, a panel with researchers and practitioners from cultural policy will discuss the topic of ‘Written Artefacts: Research and Ethics’ on 28 September. Participants include

• Heba Abd El Gawad, Research Fellow, Institute of Archaeology, University College London; Fackson Banda, Head of the Documentary Heritage Division at UNESCO;
• Mariachiara Esposito, Seconded National Expert at the Cultural Policy Unit of the European Commission;
• Corinne Flacke, Programme Director for Humanities and Cultural Studies at the German Research Foundation;
• Peter Kettner, Head of the Strategy and Planning Division for Foreign Cultural and Social Policy, Federal Foreign Office;
• Michael Popham (Digital Preservation Analyst at the Digital Preservation Coalition and Former Head of Digital Collections and Preservation at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library;
• Simon Tanner, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at King’s College London
• Catherine Walsh, Director of Cataloging at Hill Museum & Manuscript Library;
• and Donna Yates, Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Maastricht University.

Ethics in manuscript research is only one of the many topics of the three-day international conference. With more than 160 researchers from all over the world and around 120 lectures, poster presentations, and panel discussions, the conference is the largest in the current funding phase of the Cluster of Excellence UWA. Following the core approach of UWA, it brings together experts of different writing cultures and epochs in order to gain a holistic understanding of the cultural technique of writing from antiquity to the digital age.

All lectures at the conference are open to the public and free of charge. The programme and all abstracts can be accessed on the website of the conference, where you can also register for individual days or the entire event.

Parallel to the conference, the exhibition on the ‘Written Treasures of Hamburg: New Questions to Old Manuscripts’ (‘Hamburgs Schriftschätze: Neue Fragen an alte Manuskripte’) at the Hamburg State and University Library (SUB) comes to an end. Presenting the research of the Cluster using 20 particularly significant manuscripts from the holdings of the SUB, it is on display for one more week until 2 October. The conference also marks the end of the ‘Increasing Countdown’, a digital writing band of unreadable signs that the artist Axel Malik launched in view of the conference more than two years ago.