25 September 2023
Conference with more than 160 participantsWritten Artefacts: Balancing Research and Responsibility
Photo: Karsten Helmholz
Many manuscript artefacts provide irreplaceable evidence of earlier cultures. Those who want to research on them are often confronted with ethical questions about the responsible use of the artefacts themselves, as well as the research data, and the communities that produced those artefacts. On 28 September at Universität Hamburg a panel of experts including representatives from academia and cultural politics will discuss the subject of Written Artefacts: Research and Ethics. The panel includes Fackson Banda, chair of the Documentary Heritage Unit at UNESCO, and Corinne Flacke program director for Humanities and Cultural Studies at the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Ethics in manuscript cultures is only one of numerous topics to be covered at the international conference Studying Written Artefacts: Challenges and Perspectives. With more than 160 researchers from all over the world, and around 120 presentations and podium discussions, the conference is the largest of the ongoing funding phase of the Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts. The Cluster organized the conference to bring experts from a range of manuscript cultures and eras together, to obtain an holistic understanding of the art of writing from antiquity to the digital age.
All presentations at the conference are free and open to the public. The program is available on the Cluster’s website, if you wish to register for individual days or for the whole event.
Central to the Excellence Cluster’s research approach is the combination of the humanities with natural and computer sciences. By integrating expertise, for example, from the field of food chemistry, particle physics, and artificial intelligence, the Cluster is enabling the development of entirely new avenues of research into historic and modern written artefacts. The Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts is thus creating a conceptual space for research into written artefacts from all cultures and eras, including not only manuscripts, but also inscriptions and graffiti.
The exhibition Hamburg’s Written Treasures: New questions of Old Manuscripts is being held at the same time until 2 October in the State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky, displaying the Cluster’s research through 20 particularly valuable written treasures from the library’s collection.