As we were thinking about the Digital Classicist London seminar series on the theme of World Classics, which starts in a couple weeks and runs over the summer, with a few occasional events over the rest of the 2021–22 academic year, we have been discussing coverage and inclusivity. The programme the organisers have put together is very exciting and I look forward to all of the seminars, but it can not be said to cover “the world.” The programme includes papers covering Arabic, Egyptology/Coptic, Ethiopic, Ancient Italic, Jewish/Hebrew, Maya, South/Southeast Asian and Syriac; and presenters at (or from) Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Romania, Syria and the USA.
I’m very keen to see this as the start of a conversation, not the end of a focus on “world classics” in the Digital Classicist seminar. That said, this is not the beginning of the story either: although many of the papers we have featured over the last fifteen years of the London seminar (and many many more in Berlin, Leipzig, New England) have been on Greco-Roman classics and archaeology, we have also welcomed “classics” from other ancient cultures.
I would like to offer here a “virtual programme” of digital world classics seminars from the past 6 years (as long as we have been streaming to YouTube). I’m not including here any seminars from Berlin’s YouTube channel, although we could add them if someone wants to help compile a list. If you haven’t watched them before, please feel welcome to follow this virtual, asynchronous seminar programme!
- Usama Gad (Heidelberg), Graecum-Arabicum-Latinum Encoded Corpus (GALEN©) (2015)
- Eleanor Robson (University College London), From the ground to the cloud: digital edition of freshly excavated cuneiform tablets on Oracc (2016)
- Donald Sturgeon (Harvard), Crowdsourcing a digital library of pre-modern Chinese (2017)
- Dorothea Reule & Pietro Liuzzo (Hamburg), Issues in the development of digital projects based on user requirements. The case of Beta maṣāḥǝft (2017)
- Zena Kamash (Royal Holloway), Embracing customization in post-conflict reconstruction (2018)
- Monica Berti, Franziska Naether (Leipzig) & Eleni Bozia (Florida), The Digital Rosetta Stone Project (2018)
- Anshuman Pandey (Michigan), Tensions of Standardization and Variation in the Encoding of Ancient Scripts in Unicode (2018)
- Rune Rattenborg (Durham), Further and Further Into the Woods: Lessons from the Crossroads of Cuneiform Studies, Landscape Archaeology, and Spatial Humanities Research (2018)
- Julian Bogdani (La Sapienza, Rome), PAThs: a digital archaeological atlas of Coptic literature for the study of Late Antique Egypt (2019)
- Tea Ghigo et al. (La Sapienza, Rome), Archeometric analysis of inks from Coptic manuscripts (2019)
