Dr Johannes Thomann (Visiting Researcher, Islamic Studies, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, IAOS; University of Zürich, UZH) is responsible for organizing panels in the digital humanities section at the next meeting of the Deutsche Orientalistentag, DOT, September 8–12, 2025, at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
In 2022, I interviewed Beatrice Gründler and Alberto Cantera Glera about their digital humanities workshop at DOT Berlin, which sought to create a platform for exchange among participants and improve the state of the field.
As DOT 2025 approaches, Dr. Thomann answered questions about the role of the digital humanities at DOT.
Q1. What are your intentions in convening the section “Digital Humanities” at the DOT?
First, allow me to explain what the DOT is. The acronym stands for Deutscher Orientalistentag (‘German Day of Orientalists’), a congress of scholars from all fields of Oriental studies, which includes Middle Eastern studies as well as South Asian, Central Asian, East Asian and African studies from all eras. It is organized by the DMG, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (‘German Oriental Society’), which was founded in 1845 and since then has become the main professional association of orientalists in Germany. Since 1921, the DMG organizes an international congress, called DOT, every three years on average. Despite its name, the most commonly used language is English, and participants come from all over the world. The DOT has become one of the largest congresses in the field of oriental studies with approximately one thousand participants. The aim of the Digital Humanities (DH) section of the DOT is to give ‘Digital Orientalists’ an insight into current projects in their field and to show other orientalists examples of what DH means in practice.
“The aim of the Digital Humanities (DH) section of the DOT is to give ‘Digital Orientalists’ an insight into current projects in their field and to show other orientalists examples of what DH means in practice.”
Q2. What do you expect brings participants to such panels?
First, they should not miss the deadline for submitting abstracts on February 28! They are expected to present actual ongoing research in DH. Projects that break new ground are very welcome, whether in terms of the technical methods used, the topics they explore or the way in which the results are presented. Particularly interesting would be examples of how independently created projects can be productively linked with one another. An excellent, very recent example of this is the link between the “Arabic Papyrology Database,” the “Princeton Geniza Project,” and the “Thesaurus d’Épigraphie Islamique.” Jessica Goldberg, member of the advisory board of the “Geniza Lab” at Princeton University and one of the architects of the “Princeton Geniza Project”, has been invited to the DOT2025 as guest of honor and will give the keynote lecture of the DH section.
“Particularly interesting would be examples of how independently created projects can be productively linked with one another. An excellent, very recent example of this is the link between the ‘Arabic Papyrology Database,’ the ‘Princeton Geniza Project,’ and the ‘Thesaurus d’Épigraphie Islamique.'”
Q3. To what extent is the organization of the DH section at the DOT a “first” for you?
It is indeed the first time that I am organizing a section at a big international conference. As it has turned out so far, the job is less demanding as I expected. The organizing committee is communicative and works efficiently. The well-thought-out system for the submission and evaluation of abstracts is a great help, which reduces my workload to a minimum.
Q4. What professional qualifications do you have for this task?
At high school I learned to program in Fortran, and as an undergraduate I made calculations with a TI pocket calculator which was programmable with a maximum of fifty key strokes. This way I learned to write compact code. My first experience as a professional in DH were with e-learning projects at Zurich University in the 1990s. With the “Arabic Papyrology School” the cooperation with Andreas Kaplony started in 2000. The project of the “Arabic Papyrology Database” (APD), financed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, followed. Until 2020, the year of my retirement at Zurich University, I was responsible for the technical work at the APD, and I wrote most of the code in JSP and SQL. I atteneded many DH conferences and workshops as a participant, and organized an international conference on DH at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies (IAOS) of Zurich University.
Q5. What short-term accomplishments do you expect from DOT2025?
At an in-person conference, meeting with previously known or unknown researchers is the most immediately fruitful outcome. In a large-scale conference, the chance of unexpected encounters is particularly high.
Q6. What do you expect in terms of long-term impact?
For the individual participants to start new projects, or to connect an existing project to another project and thus establishing long term cooperations can be installed on. For young scholars good chances for job opportunities exist. In fact, I was offered my first job at a university at the DOT in Tübingen in 1983 during a conversation over a coffee break.
“For young scholars good chances for job opportunities exist. In fact, I was offered my first job…at the DOT in Tübingen in 1983 during a conversation over a coffee break.”
Q7. What directions in the “digital humanities” ecosystem do you admire/deplore?
What I admire in DH is the great opportunity of creating innovative solutions with minimal effort. A few lines of code can do a great job: That’s the great lure of IT technologies. After decades of working in DH, it still drives me.
On the negative side: One of the major problems in the DH in my view is the lack of good solution for the long-term maintenance of projects (i.e. “heritage data”). Traditionally, having published your research, your job was done. The libraries would take care of the book or the journal volume for the unlimited future without any interference with the author. In the case of DH products, highly specialized competence may be necessary for their maintenance. Unfortunately, upward compatibility of IT infrastructure is an illusion. Any new version can bring your application to a standstill. This may happen when the financing period of your project has long since expired. The new edition of a book can be economically attractive for a publisher. But financing a total rebuild of a DH product in order to keep pace with technological progress is almost impossible in practice. Often this leads to rapid death of your scientific work.
“One of the major problems in the DH in my view is the lack of good solution for the long-term maintenance of projects (i.e. ‘heritage data’). Any new version can bring your application to a standstill… Often this leads to rapid death of your scientific work.”
Q8. In what ways do digital methods in the field called “Oriental studies” exemplify/diverge from general directions in DH?
For the most part, the situation in Oriental studies is the same as in other fields of the humanities. Luckly, the processing of non-Latin writing systems is no longer a problem. One difference is the lack of some basic scientific instruments in Oriental Studies, which in other fields of the humanities have long been established using conventional methods. This offers the opportunity to create them now using DH methods, as their obvious necessity helps when applying for funding. This was the case with the APD.
Q9. After this, what would you like to do next?
Apart from eventual unexpected new research ideas inspired by presentations or coffee break conversations at the DOT, I will pursue my idea presented at the DOT on the statistical analysis of fragmentary transmitted texts. I am trying to find out under which conditions a gap in the covering of a text by early fragments may be considered as [coincidental], and under which conditions it is a significant indication for a later interpolation in the textual history. My test example are the fragmentary Aramaic Qumran texts of the book of Enoch, and the question if its part, the “Book of Parables” (chapters 37-71) must be considered a later addition to the text of if its absence in the fragments could be [coincidental].
Q10. What would you like to see DOT participants do next?
I hope that the participants in the section of DH will get a motivation boost to pursue their projects and hopefully maintain contacts which they made inside and outside the DH at the DOT.
The Digital Orientalist 