The TEUCHOS centre – an institution that aims to provide digital research infrastructure in the fields of scholarly editing, paleography, manuscript research and history of philology and is located at the University of Hamburg – organized between 20 and 22 January a conference with the title “Digital Philology – Problems and Perspectives“. The presentations focused on tools, imaging, resources, cataloguing, and editing, and was preceded by a workshop on the digital edition of letter corpora. It did indeed provide a good overview over the state of digital editing and the tools and technologies necessary to produce these – both their achievements and problems. Some of the issues that came up during the conference were:
- the legal situation created by current copyright laws
- the relation of the digital research environment to traditional research discourses
- the need for broader agreement on issues of standards and unique identifiers
- the development of new protocols in referring to digital products
- the availability of digital editions and the tools to produce them
Another aspect was the conversations and the networking facilitated between work in different projects, countries, and languages: not only between projects mostly in German, English, French, or Italian, but also several Russian projects.
The conference organizers will no doubt wish to share more information about both the conference and the TEUCHOS project as whole in time. It is very much hoped that the TEUCHOS centre succeed in obtaining the necessary funding to begin such important work in Germany in a truly international and collaborative spirit.
