The workshop on December 10, 2019 forms part of an on-going collaboration between the AnonymClassic project and Freie Universität Berlin Campus Library to foster discussion on and development of Digital Humanities. Helen Younansardaroud, Cosima Wagner and their team (Campus Library) kindly acted as the hosts.

They not only provided the facilities but vice-director H. Younansardaroud also gave the group an inspiring tour of the institution, discussing its history and digitization activities. A special treat was the presentation of a selection of old books focusing on the interests of our guest of honour.

For this pilot meeting of the AnonymClassic Q&A Workshop series, we had invited the Arabist Cornelis van Lit (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands) to discuss his recently published book “Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World.”

After a thought-provoking introduction by van Lit, Ute Pietruschka (Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung) and Marcus Pöckelmann (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) gave their prepared responses.

Central to the lively discussion afterwards was the question of what impact DH have on the definition of “edition”, both theoretically and practically.

The newly introduced format drew an audience of quite diverse backgrounds, including philologists, librarians, and IT-specialists. Both the event itself, and the informal exchanges to come with it were inspired with fresh ideas and opened perspectives on new projects.

It seems quite clear that we will just have to have a follow-up on the Q&A, or maybe even two.

written by Jan van Ginkel

With special thanks to Klaus Memmert, Berlin (photographs).