The Bonn Center for Digital Humanities (BCDH) was officially opened in a ceremonial event in the university's traditional function room (Festsaal), accompanied by speeches from Prof. Dr. Volker Kronenberg, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and by the Director of the University and State Library, Dr. Meyer-Doerpinghaus. The new center has the mission of supporting digital scholarship in the humanities by providing a professional framework for current or future digital humanities projects. It will be supported by the University and State Library and the university’s IT center. Prof. Dr. Stephan Conermann, the University’s Vice Rector for International Affairs, and Professor for Archaeology, Prof. Dr. Martin Bentz, also spoke.
The BCDH will be situated within the Faculty of Arts, where it will assist in collaborative digitization projects, including a digital atlas with an interactive depiction of archeological sites of artefacts that will feature in a touring exhibition focusing on ‘bodies of dependency’. The exhibition will be jointly curated by the university’s various collections and museums along with regional museums. There will also be a mapping project, ‘Voices of the Voiceless’, which will visualise social differences and trace migration movements of voiceless people.
In addition, the BCDH will consolidate numerous existing digital projects across a wide variety of disciplines, including a text database and dictionary of Classic Mayan1 and an archive of virtual Maya inscriptions; an online database of images for teaching classical archaeology and art history2; a digital collection of reports on ‘Saracens’ in Latin Christian sources from the seventh to the eleventh centuries (work in progress); a relaunch of the Thesaurus Linguae Sericae3 (a synonym dictionary of Classical Chinese); a semantic database that explores the university’s dynamic collection and discourse history based on Alexander von Humboldt’s concept of the cosmos4 (KOSMOS); and a digitised version of the Acts of the Council of Ephesus5 in 431.