Workshop Vienna May 2022

Date: May 16-20, 2023
Place: University of Vienna
Name: The Characters that Shaped the Silk Road
Description: In May 2022, three members of the ERC HisTochText project, Timoth´ee Chamot-Rooke, Athanaric Huard, and Véronique Kremmer, traveled to Vienna to collaborate with the project “the Characters that Shaped the Silk Road - A Database and Digital Paleography of Tarim Brahmi,” led by Hanner Fellner, associate professor at the University of Vienna. We were invited by the Viennese team to discuss the technical aspects of the collaboration between our two projects.

: The main goals of this trip were to familiarize with the new structure of the database of Tocharian texts in the perspective of editing the Paris Tocharian manuscripts and to discuss manuscript description techniques. The ERC HisTochText project plans to integrate the text editions that we produce into the CEToM database (A Comprehensive Edition of Tocharian Manuscripts), which is managed by the Vienna team. This collaboration continues the work initiated by Georges- Jean Pinault, who has edited since 2011 many Paris Tocharian manuscripts for the CEToM database. The Vienna team has recently introduced a new database structure, and we needed to familiarize ourselves with this design and to determine how to connect our teams’ productions. Since the Vienna team is currently carrying out a project on palaeography, we were also interested to discuss several aspects of manuscriptology with them. In preparation for the catalog of the Pelliot Koutch´een collection, Athanaric Huard developed a new codicological nomenclature of the manuscripts, which includes a typology of the manuscripts according to their script. Thus, our second aim was to exchange information about our respective results.

: We met with the Vienna team every day for a week in their project premises. In addition to Hanner Fellner, the Viennese team included researchers Bernhard Koller and Martin Braun, as well as two graduate students, Angelo Mascheroni and Adrian Musitz. On the first day, the Vienna team presented their project, the structure of their database, and the new computer tools they were developing. We discussed how to record the data and make it accessible to the researcher community, as well as the opportunity to develop new IT tools. The following days were devoted to practical workshops. The project members had prepared 59 preliminary transcriptions of unedited manuscripts from the Paris collection (PK NS 89, 109, 112, 113, 116, 118, 122, 124a, 147, 151 to 200). The workshop participants were divided into small groups, each of which was assigned a set of fragments. The task was to improve the preliminary transcription, to provide translation of the fragments and to code them in XML language according to the new format of the CEToM database.

: The week-long workshop was a productive and valuable experience. We engaged in fruitful discussions about the technical aspects of our collaboration. We gained insight into both the overall database structure and how to tackle practical issues that emerged during text editing. Thanks to the joint efforts, we were able to produce the final edition of 59 fragments of the “Pelliot Koutch´een” collection, and also established a workflow for future remote collaboration and work on the Paris texts. Additionally, we exchanged information and insights on the latest developments in paleography and manuscript description.