Cluster of Excellence
Understanding Written Artefacts
Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures
Since 2019, CSMC is home to the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ (UWA). Funded by the DFG and in cooperation with Helmut Schmidt Universität, TU Hamburg, and the Universität Lübeck, the Cluster comprises over 50 research projects from 40 academic disciplines. Combining approaches from the humanities and the natural sciences, UWA is organised in five research fields, which focus on different dimensions of written artefacts, such as their materiality, spatiality, content, and format.
- Artefact Profiling (Research Field A)
- Inscribing Spaces (Research Field B)
- Creating Originals (Research Field C)
- Formatting Contents (Research Field D)
- Archiving Artefacts (Research Field E)
In sum, the research at UWA aims to develop a global framework for the study of all written artefacts from the beginning of writing to the present day and from all regions that have produced such artefacts.
In addition, working groups and seminars provide a research infrastructure to deepen interdisciplinary cooperation:
- The research unit ‘Data Linking’ supports and connects individual projects and facilitates their work through efficient processing of research data.
- The working group ‘Theory and Terminology’ (TNT) investigates concepts and methods from different areas of manuscript research and examines their analytical usefulness.
- The working group ‘Facing New Technologies’ (FNT) analyses how the rise of new technologies, such as printing or digital media, transforms certain manuscript cultures, where they differ from each other in this process, and why.
- The working group ‘Ethics’ raises awareness to ethically challenging situations in research contexts and offers guidelines for responsible research.
- The Permanent Seminar on Manuscript Analysis, Description, and Documentation provides a forum for exchange on cataloguing practices and the digitisation of written artefacts from a comparative perspective.
Research Programme
Research Environment
