Starting on 13 MayThe Digital Lunch Seminar Series is Back

6 May 2024

Photo: Esfandiari/UHH

Two researchers, one hour, one topic: the Digital Lunch Seminar Series highlights concrete examples of cooperation between the humanities, natural sciences, and computer sciences at the CSMC. This summer semester, the series is back with four lectures.

The fifth edition of the seminar series starts on 13 May with a joint presentation by Alba Fedeli and Sowmeya Sathiyamani. They use three fragments that likely belonged to a larger Qur’anic codex from Cairo to show that analysis of the materials can provide precious information about their relative chronology, which is essential when dealing with undated, unlocated, and fragmentary manuscripts.

On 10 June, Cécile Michel and Christian Schroer provide their highly-anticipated field report about their trip to the Louvre earlier this year, where they used ENCI, the world’s first mobile computer tomograph to analyse cultural heritage objects, for the first time to read sealed cuneiform clay tablets.

On 1 July, Hussein Mohammed and Jost Gippert explain how recent advances in the field of generative artificial intelligence can help to retrieve the undertexts from historical palimpsests – even in cases in which modern imaging techniques reach their limits.

Finally, on 8 July, Stelios Aspiotis, Olivier Bonnerot, and Leah Mascia present the preliminary results of an interdisciplinary study dedicated to a corpus of ancient Egyptian and Egyptianising scarabs and scaraboids part of the collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg.

The lecture series is open to everyone. More information on the talks, the contributors, and access to the Zoom sessions is available on the website of the seminar series.