A literary view through the lens of Gerhard Roth
Styrian writer Gerhard Roth (1942–2022), who was also a photographic artist, left behind around 60,000 photographs – ranging from everyday moments and landscapes to abstract motifs. He captured life in southern Styria as well as impressions from his travels to America, Egypt and Japan. Many of his photographs appeared in illustrated books such as Atlas der Stille (Atlas of Silence) and Über Land und Meer (Over Land and Sea) or other publications such as Im unsichtbaren Wien (Invisible Vienna) and Spuren (Traces).
The Franz Nabl Institute for Literary Research at the University of Graz has digitised around 40,000 photos from 1977 to 2017 and tagged them with over 200 keywords. The digital photo archive, including information about Gerhard Roth and his works, is available at gams.uni-graz.at/roth. Due to data protection restrictions, a password is required, which can be obtained from the collection's curator at daniela.bartens(at)uni-graz.at.
An interview with Gerhard Roth from 2012 can be found in UNIZEIT magazine.
Palliative work: thinking through to the end
What do people need at the end of their lives – beyond medical and nursing care? As part of the FWF project "Philosophical Practice in Palliative Care and Hospice Work", philosopher and former nurse Patrick Schuchter and his team are researching how philosophical practice can provide support to the dying, their relatives and carers.
Discussions with those affected focus on exploring questions about life together: Have I lived well? What matters? What comes after death? Participants found the discussions inspiring and relieving. "It is quite obvious that it is not only the body that needs to be cared for, but also the spiritual being," Schuchter summarises.
The project team is currently working on proposals for integrating philosophical practice into the health and social care system.
To the Unizeit article (2025)
Reading between the lines
Bernhard Bauer from the Institute for Digital Humanities is examining medieval glosses – marginalia and interlinear notes in manuscripts – in order to research language contact and knowledge transfer in the early Middle Ages. Among other things, he is looking at Old Irish, Old Breton and Old Welsh notes in Latin works such as Priscian's grammar or Bede's calendar treatise. Bauer is particularly fascinated by Irish scribes' personal notes about their everyday lives: "Interestingly, such personal information can only be found in Irish notes."
Thanks to digital facsimiles and automatic text recognition, transcription can now be done efficiently, but some details still require work on the original. The aim of the Glossit project is to make the paths of knowledge and multilingualism visible. "The glosses show how scholarly communication worked at that time – often across language barriers," says Bauer.
To the Unizeit article (2025)
