CSMC Newsletter

After a 24,000-kilometer sea voyage, the CSMC’s Container Lab has arrived in Puducherry in south-eastern India. There, our team set it up on the premises of the Institut Français de Pondichéry (IFP) together our local project partners. On 10 June, they received representatives from the German and French consulates in Puducherry to show the lab and thank them for their support in realising the trip. Now the research into historical palm-leaf manuscripts, which is part of the ‘Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative’, is about to begin.

Manuscript cultures have frequently forgotten, neglected, or even erased women’s contributions from memory. These omissions result in an incomplete understanding of these cultures. Female Agency in Manuscript Cultures, the recently published new volume in the Studies in Manuscript Cultures series, attempts to address this problem by exploring the different and overlapping ways in which women acted as autonomous agents in manuscript cultures through a range of case studies. The volume also sheds light on the challenges and obstacles that women faced in various cultural and historical contexts and that stood in their way of developing this autonomy. It is available open access and can be downloaded from our website.

Multispectral data have until now been generated – mostly at great expense – to make obscured writing visible. In a recent paper in Manuscript Studies, a group of CSMC researchers use three music manuscripts from the early 15th century to demonstrate how processed multispectral data can provide digital images that contain new evidence about the manuscript’s past, production, use, and interaction with other objects. The paper is aimed at manuscript researchers and imaging scholars, as well as librarians and conservators, interested in the information on materiality that can be gleaned from manuscripts by applying MSI, and that can thus enrich our understanding of these unique objects. It is available open access.

In many manuscript cultures, it was common practice to reuse damaged or outdated manuscripts, including religious documents, for the production of book bindings. Although widely known, there has been little research on this practice to date. In cooperation with the Hamburg State and University Library (SUB), researchers at the CSMC are currently conducting initial trials to analyse selected manuscripts from the Middle East, which belong to the holdings of the SUB. For this purpose, they are using the mobile computer tomograph ENCI, which was originally constructed to read closed cuneiform clay tablets. 

In the long-term project Tamilex, running from 2023 to 2047, researchers produce a historical dictionary of the Classical Tamil language. On 5 July, from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm, members of the project will open the doors for the public for the first time and showcase their recent work. Manuscripts, old books, digitisation, encoding, recitation – all these things will be released open access and open source, but on this special day the researchers are looking forward to receiving visitors, especially from the community of Tamilians abroad who support the project in various ways. Everyone is welcome but please register if you want to attend the event.

The technique of woodblock printing, which can be used to mass-produce texts and images, is and has been part of many manuscript cultures around the world. Examples can be found from the 7th to the 20th century. The workshop ‘Woodblock Printing. A Cross-Cultural Approach’ aimed to bring together experts on the different cultures using woodblock printing. A short workshop report on our website looks back at some key themes of the interdisciplinary discussions.

How did musical heritage disseminate and what was the role of materiality in this process? A workshop on ‘Musical Heritage Across Borders – Materiality as an Indicator of Distribution Channels’ brought together experts from various cultures and disciplines to discuss these questions. The workshop not only showcased new research findings but also explored innovative approaches and methodologies. A brief overview on our website summarises the individual contributions.

Peruvian music from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries reflects the history of a country shaped by colonialism and combines Latin American and European influences in unique ways. A research project at the CSMC investigates Peruvian music manuscripts from this period and held an international workshop on this topic on 14 June. The day ended with a special event: In cooperation with the Hochschule für Musik und Theater (HfMT), selected works were performed in a well-attended evening concert at ‘Kleiner Michel’ in Hamburg. Parts of this special concert experience will soon be available as recordings on our website.

The CSMC and its Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ have been awarding the J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award since 2021, but it was only this year that the award was presented in person for the first time. Elif Sezer, who also gave an Informal Talk entitled ‘Written by the Folks: A Material Exploration of Popular Storybooks from the Last Ottoman Manuscript Age’ on the same day, and Daria Kohler, who is currently a fellow at the CSMC, received the award during a ceremony on 27 June. Details of the J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award 2024 will be announced in September this year.

The Diversity Days have been taking place at Universität Hamburg since 2016. Since 2019, they have included an event organised jointly by the four Clusters of Excellence of the university – ‘Climate, Climatic Change, and Society’ (CLICCS), ‘CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter’, ‘Quantum Universe, and ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’. The centrepiece of this year’s session, which was devoted to the topic of ‘Reframing Excellence: For More Diversity in Academia’, was a presentation by Zen Faulkes entitled ‘Improving Research Assessment’. A recording of the full lecture is available on our website.