Panel

In the framework of the Summer University a public panel discussion will take place in the lecture hall of the Bibliotheca Albertina. It is scheduled for the 21st of July 2017 from 16:15 to 17:45. This year the panel discussion is devoted to questions regarding the meaning of access and sustainability in different knowledge domains and the way these can be guaranteed.

This topic seems very important, because as not only the lectures will show, our research is more and more based on digital data and our research results are more and more digital as well.

Up to not very long ago a lot of the data which we used for our research were exclusively available in documents, books, pictures, physical objects etc. archived in libraries, archives or museums or were hidden in the earth for example. Access to these was and still is not always free and sustainability was and is often a question of such institutions surviving time, wars, calamities or of the levels of the ground archeologists, for example, discard or find interesting. With digitalisation the question of (open) access is, however, changing radically.

If we are not careful, the question of sustainability gets decided in the wrong way. What are unimportant data, for example for Humanists? Are my data gathered on the basis of old newspapers discardable because they are old or are they perhaps useful for diachronic language studies for example? What does age of data mean for archeologists, historians, Art historians? Who should decide and how? And what about the multilingual data of the Humanities when national research infrastructures are given the responsibility to cater for sustainability? Will they attach a value to them or will they just look after German data for example, and as we tend to misunderstand internationalisation as Englishisation, English data? What about Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese sources Romance studies built on?

Such questions will first be discussed by the members of the panel. Then we will open the discussion to everybody in the room.

Members of the panel

• Prof. Dr. Ulrich Johannes Schneider, Director of the University Library Leipzig
• Dr. Martin Roth, Assistant professor (Juniorprofessor) of Japan Studies, University of Leipzig
• Dr. Dagmar A. Riedel, Columbia University, Center for Iranian Studies & Marie Curie Fellow at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid
• Dr. Rahul Krishna Gairola, Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Literature, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India

Programme

• Elisabeth Burr "Introduction / Presentation of panelists" (5 minutes)
• Short statement by panelists (5 minutes each)
• Discussion among the panelists (ca. 25 minutes)
• Open discussion with the floor (ca. 30-45 minutes)