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- Akademienvorhaben Altägyptisches Wörterbuch (5)
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- Drittmittelprojekt Proyecto Humboldt Digital (2)
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The principal objective of this article is to reflect (in a philosophical manner) on recent developments in moral legislation in The Netherlands. The term ›moral legislation‹ refers to all forms of legislation on issues which can be regarded as ›moral‹ – such as euthanasia and animal experimentation. The reason for focussing on The Netherlands is that, on an international level, it is a country which has gained a reputation for being ›liberal‹, and is therefore admired by some and held in abhorrence by others.
The article provides historical background for Alexander von Humboldt’s expedition into Russia in 1829. It includes information on Humboldt’s works and publications in Russia over the course of his lifetime, as well as an explanation of the Russian scientific community’s response to those works. Humboldt’s ideas on the existence of an active volcano in Central Asia attracted the attention of two prominent Russian geographers, P.Semenov and P.Kropotkin, whose views on the nature of volcanism were quite different. P.Semenov personally met Humboldt in Berlin. P. Kropotkin made one of the most important geological discoveries of the 19th Century: he found the fresh volcanic cones near Lake Baikal. Soon after Humboldt’s Russian expedition, and partly as a result of it, an important mineral was found in the Ilmen mountains - samarskite, which later gave its name to the chemical element Samarium, developed in 1879. At the beginning of the 20th Century, the Russian scientist V.Vernadskiy pointed out that samarskite was the first uranium-rich mineral found in Russia.
Dealing with the Consequences of Climate Change in Historic Parks and Gardens in the United Kingdom
(2019)
Given that long term climate change is recognised as having an ›impact upon all aspects of daily life, not least the survival of heritage assets‹ there is a need to consider all aspects of heritage in the United Kingdom (UK). In order to provide an international context for the German situation this paper looks specifically at adaptation measures that have developed within the main British conservation and horticultural organisations, Historic England, the National Trust and the Royal Horticultural Society. It does this by providing some cultural context for the present policies. It then looks at how the climate is expected to change by the end of this century. It identifies the main challenges, and then reviews the responses by way of adaptation and mitigation.
When thinking about the historic landscape gardens of the Berlin-Brandenburg region we tend to focus automatically on the royal gardens that Peter Joseph Lenné originally included in his beautification plan for the Potsdam area that are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There is good reason for this focus. The complex of Sanssouci, Charlottenhof, Neuer Garten, Babelsberg, Glienicke, and Pfaueninsel constitutes an extraordinarily beautiful panorama. But from a broader perspective the unique character of these gardens can be seen to have informed the garden landscape of all of Berlin in a series of social transformations that occurred during the course of industrialisation in the nineteenth century. For this purpose it is useful to focus on the role of steam power. By no means, however, did the significance of steam power (or the lack of it) end with its utilitarian function, for it informed the aesthetic character of landscape gardens, too. And this character changed with the historical transformations that associated different sorts of gardens with people in different social strata. I will schematise three such »classes« of people and gardens.
Norsk Ordbok is a 12 volume academic dictionary covering Norwegian Nynorsk literature and all Norwegian dialects from 1600 to the present. The dictionary is to be completed in 2014, the year of the bicentenary of the Norwegian constitution. The collection of data started in 1930 and the editing of the dictionary started in 1946. In the 1990s the Norwegian language collections were digitized, and from 2002 onwards Norsk Ordbok has been edited on a digital platform which communicates with a system of relational databases for manuscript storage. These databases include digitized slip archives, a draft manuscript from 1940, glossaries from the period between 1600 and 1850, canonical dictionaries from the period 1870-1910, bibliography, local dictionaries, text corpus (90 mill. words) etc. The source material is linked together in a Meta dictionary (MD). The MD is an electronic index with headwords in standard spelling, and it represents the hub of the language collections, where the source material from the databases is linked to headword nodes. This MD in turn communicates with the editing system and the dictionary database. The electronic linking up of the source material with the dictionary entries secures that the interpretation of data and product of scientific research can be reproducible in a very easy way. This is important to a scholarly dictionary. Further, the MD index system enables us to set a relative dimension for each dictionary entry and to make a master plan for setting alphabet dimensions for the whole dictionary. This is important to all modern dictionary projects with limited resources. The digitized source material, the digital editing platform and the digital dictionary product also point forward to new ways of presenting the data, and they point forward to future lexicographical research. The paper will present the digital resources of the Norsk Ordbok 2014 project, developed in close cooperation with the scientific programmers at the Unit of Digital Documentation at the University of Oslo. It will focus on the Norsk Ordbok 2014 experience with working on a fully digitized editing platform for the last 10 years, and it will also comment briefly on how the developed tools and resources point forward into Norwegian lexicography in the future.
Together with their wives Otto and Richard Schomburgk arrived in Port Adelaide (South Australia) on August 16th 1849. The essay looks at how these two brothers, who had received their scientific training and promotion in the circle surrounding Alexander von Humboldt, reacted to the unfamiliar conditions in the young British colony. Some indication will be given as to the differences between the Schomburgk brothers treatment of the natural resources of the new colony and that of the English colonists of the time.
Introduction : The Grants, Dreaming Darwin's Dream ; (Ernst Mayr Lecture am 4. November 2004)
(2006)
Introduction : how much is enough, but not too much ; (Ernst-Mayr-Lecture am 27. Oktober 1998)
(1999)
Der Fachkräftemangel in Mathematik, Informatik, Naturwissenschaften und Technik (MINT) erweist sich immer mehr als Hemmnis für den Hochtechnologiestandort Deutschland. Für eine nachhaltige Sicherung des Fachkräftebedarfs ist eine attraktive MINT-Bildung Voraussetzung. Zudem stellt sich in einer Gesellschaft, die von Natur- und Technikwissenschaften geprägt ist, die Notwendigkeit, allen Menschen ein entsprechendes Grundverständnis zu vermitteln. Wissenschaft und Politik sind gefordert, didaktisch wirksame und für junge Menschen attraktive Konzepte für eine MINT-Bildung zu entwickeln und umzusetzen. Einerseits, um begabte junge Menschen gezielt zu fördern, andererseits,um eine basale MINT-Allgemeinbildung im Schulsystem zu verankern. Der Sammelband fasst die Ergebnisse einer interdisziplinären Arbeitsgruppe der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW) zusammen und analysiert die Ursachen für den mangelnden Erfolg von MINT-Initiativen in Deutschland und Europa, dokumentiert erfolgreiche Modellprojekte und zeigt Lösungswege für die Bildungs- und Wissenschaftspolitik auf. Ergänzt werden diese Beiträge mit den Erfahrungen engagierter Initiatoren von namhaften Modellprojekten.
This paper presents the Bogoroditsk (Tula Region in Russia) Park’s history of origin in the 18th century, its subsequent functioning and degrading. Special attention is paid to the contribution of A. T. Bolotov serving as the supervisor of Bogoroditsk Volost in the 1770s–1790s. In conclusion, the contemporary state of Bogoroditsk Park and its water-supply facilities that is worrying the experts is described.
Numerous high-quality primary text sources—in the context of the curation project described here, this means full-text transcriptions (and corresponding image scans) of German works originating from the 15th to the 19th centuries—are scattered among the web or stored remotely. E.g., transcriptions of historical sources are stored locally on degrading recording media and cannot be found, let alone accessed by third parties. Additionally, idiosyncratic, project-specific markup conventions and uncommon, out-of-date or inflexible storage formats often hinder further usage and analysis of the data. Often, textual resources are accompanied by scarce, insufficient or inaccurate bibliographic information, which is only one further reason why valuable resources, even if available on the web, remain undiscovered by and are of little use to the wider research community. The integration of these dispersed primary text sources into the sustainable, web and centres-based research infrastructure of CLARIN-D will be an important step to solve this problem. The Full Paper illustrates an exemplary approach taken by the »Deutsches Textarchiv« (DTA; www.deutschestextarchiv.de) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) to integrate dispersed textual resources and corresponding image scans from various sources into a large historical text corpus of its own and to insert these into the infrastructure of CLARIN-D.
The example of Spain illustrates how the production of socio-ecological scales is centred on the social transformation of nature and the construction of socio-ecological and political-ecological scalar gestalts. Concrete geographies, with choreographies of uneven and shifting social power relations, are etched into these ecological, social, political or institutional scalar configurations. These processes are infused with contested and contestable strategies of individuals and social groups, who mobilise spatial scales as part of struggles for control and empowerment, and contest the power geometries of extant scalar gestalts. Needless to say, the mobilisation of scale, the occupation of geographical scale, and the production of scale are central moments in such processes of socio-spatial change. Struggling for the command of scale, or strategizing around excluding particular groups from the performative capabilities of certain scales, shapes social processes, defines relative empowerment and disempowerment and gives rise to very specific socio-spatial relations.
Gedanken über die weitere Arbeit am Wörterbuch der Ägyptischen Sprache
The creation of a representation official park of nationwide scale and importance is hedged about with a lot of difficulties. It is supposed to be a paragon of beauty and utility while also being an epoch’s monument remaining in place for long decades or centuries. The paper analyses the balance between the beauty and sustainability in the conception and the actual life of eight parks in the realm of Russian culture (Russian Empire, Soviet Union, Russian Federation). That said, one of them (House of Bezborodko) represents an unconsummated project, but one that is typical of its epoch.
Der Fachkräftemangel in Mathematik, Informatik, Naturwissenschaften und Technik (MINT) erweist sich immer mehr als Hemmnis für den Hochtechnologiestandort Deutschland. Für eine nachhaltige Sicherung des Fachkräftebedarfs ist eine attraktive MINT-Bildung Voraussetzung. Zudem stellt sich in einer Gesellschaft, die von Natur- und Technikwissenschaften geprägt ist, die Notwendigkeit, allen Menschen ein entsprechendes Grundverständnis zu vermitteln. Wissenschaft und Politik sind gefordert, didaktisch wirksame und für junge Menschen attraktive Konzepte für eine MINT-Bildung zu entwickeln und umzusetzen. Einerseits, um begabte junge Menschen gezielt zu fördern, andererseits,um eine basale MINT-Allgemeinbildung im Schulsystem zu verankern. Der Sammelband fasst die Ergebnisse einer interdisziplinären Arbeitsgruppe der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW) zusammen und analysiert die Ursachen für den mangelnden Erfolg von MINT-Initiativen in Deutschland und Europa, dokumentiert erfolgreiche Modellprojekte und zeigt Lösungswege für die Bildungs- und Wissenschaftspolitik auf. Ergänzt werden diese Beiträge mit den Erfahrungen engagierter Initiatoren von namhaften Modellprojekten.
In the last decade, interaction between scholarly lexicography and the public has grown enormously. While in the old days, the lexicographer and in particular, the scholarly lexicographer, had a tendency to describe the lexicon from an ivory tower, in a way that was for the general public rather unaccessible, a change has been evident for some time now. Interaction with the general public is now more and more appreciated and is even being stimulated within the lexicographic community. This holds too for the Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek (ANW), a project of the Institute for Dutch Lexicology in Leiden. The ANW is an online scholarly dictionary of contemporary Dutch. In its periodization it is the successor of the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT), which was completed in 2001 and covers the vocabulary of the Netherlands and Flanders up to around 1976. The editorial staff of the ANW would like to create a dictionary that is suitable for different audiences, ranging from language professionals and other academics to pupils, students and language enthusiasts in general. Consequently, interaction with the public is very important to the ANW editorial staff. It is realised in various ways. First, each dictionary article offers users the option to give feedback. Second, the editorial staff uses questions and comments gathered on internet forums, such as Meldpunt Taal (launched in June 2010) and Neo-term. The ANW staff also approaches the public directly through Twitter, with items such as ‘neologism of the week’, facts about spelling and answers to questions about language that have been received. A relatively new initiative is to call upon the public in the search for information for the dictionary, such as synonyms, pictures and the earliest use of words. Language games and word polls are other ways to increase the interest and involvement of the general public in the ANW.
In Lower Lusatia, eastern Germany, the changing impacts of lignite coal mining and potential climate change have put the naturally low water yield conditions under pressure. Water resources balances describe the hydrological situation in the region and the need for action due to changing boundary conditions. Extended transfer of flood water from neighbouring catchments is considered inevitable for sustainable regional development and the establishment of a quantitatively and qualitatively selfregulated water system. Using the river basin management system WBalMo®, potential water transfer scenarios to compensate for water deficits resulting from regional and global change are analysed.
The concept of ecosystem services was developed capitalizing on ecological knowledge that ecosystems perform various functions like increasing or retarding water fluxes, cleansing or polluting water, modifying microclimatic conditions, sustaining or impoverishing biological diversity and so on. There is growing body of ecological knowledge that management of agricultural landscape for its structural diversity is becoming the important pillar of the sustainability of rural areas. Programmes of environmental protection in rural areas should aim not only at introduction environmental friendly technologies of cultivation within farm. They should also be concerned with challenge of how to increase the resistance or resilience of the whole landscape against threats. Recognition of non -commodity effects of diversified agricultural landscape formed by introduction into cultivated fields shelterbelts, stretches of meadows, small mid -field water reservoirs and other biogeochemical barriers provide new options to combine societal demands with environment production. Co -adaptation of human activities with landscape services relies on policy that economic processes should be conformed with ecological processes operating in the region which are enhancing landscape capacities for naturalization of pollution, regeneration of wastes, recycling of water recourses as well as increasing resistance or resilience of the whole system to stresses caused by production of goals required by society. Recognition of system multifunctionality helps to achieve that goal. The knowledge on processes underpinning ecosystem services opened new frontiers for management of landscapes' structures towards enhancing their capacities to deliver requested services. Forests and shelterbelts show similar functions in the landscape but network of shelterbelts perform many similar services like forests growing on smaller part of landscape area. According to studies carried out by Research Centre for Agricultural and Forest Environment in Poland the following functions of shelterbelts are similar to those shown by forests when 4 -5% of the landscape area is under the network of shelterbelts: - modify the microclimatic conditions and heat and water balances; - control the water chemistry composition (control of diffuse pollution); - limit water and wind erosion; - protect the biodiversity; - increase the survival of the game animals; - enhance recreational value of the region; - provide wood and other products; - promote aesthetic values of the countryside. In this review the first four functions of agricultural landscape within Turew neighborhood will be presented.
The author’s recently published monograph on Alexander von Humboldt' describes the multiple images of this great cultural icon. The book is a metabiographical study that shows how from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day Humboldt has served as a nucleus of crystallisation for a variety of successive socio-political ideologies, each producing its own distinctive representation of him. The historiographical implications of this biographical diversity are profound and support current attempts to understand historical scholarship in terms of memory cultures.
Ediarum is an editing environment designed and implemented by TELOTA at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW, Germany). It is based on two main components: an open-source XML native database (eXistDB) and a widely used commercial XML editor (Oxygen XML editor).
The aim of ediarum is to facilitate the task of encoding texts in TEI format, to store the resulting XML files in eXistDB and to enable collaboration and sharing amongst the members of a team. The central framework of this environment --known as ediarum.BASE.edit-- allows the editor to hide the XML tags and use a number of functions through a toolbar and a menu. In other words, the ediarum.BASE.edit's interface increases the usability of the XML editor and speeds up the encoding process and can be adapted to each project's needs. However, this framework is only available in German language. In other words, the code and the language interface are only accessible for and usable by German-speaking users.
While the original goal of TELOTA was to “bridge the gap” between the markup and the editor (Dumont and Fechner, 2015), the interface language creates a barrier for encoders who do not work in German and impedes potential collaborations with other institutions. In order to break this usability and accessibility barrier, in 2020 Proyecto Humboldt Digital (ProHD), a cooperation project between the BBAW and the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de la Habana (Cuba), engaged with an adaptation process involving the internationalization of the software (developing features and code that are independent of language or locale) and the localization in the Spanish locale (creating resource files containing translations). As a result of this process, the project has developed a localization of ediarum.BASE.edit called ediarum.PROHD.edit that can be downloaded on Github.
This paper aims to present ediarum.PROHD.edit and to reflect on the most important challenges encountered during the software localization. After reviewing what “localization” means in Translation Studies (Pym, 2016; Jiménez Crespo, 2016), I will discuss the process of internationalization of the software (mostly variables written in ediarum's default functions), the localization itself (the translation of terms and descriptions displayed in the interface) and some testing undertaken with the Cuban team of Proyecto Humboldt Digital.
New, precise genetic engineering methods for genome alteration in living cells, which can be classed together under the generic heading “genome surgery”,are currently sparking a revolution in biomedical research. The Interdisciplinary Research Group Gene Technology Report is, in principle, in favour of research on these promising new methods for the medical sector. However, for the time being, it has clearly spoken out against gene surgery experiments on the human germ line, which could also enter the realm of possibility thanks to these methods.The research group, therefore, supports the call, which has already been discussed at length in scientific and public circles, for a moratorium for germ line experiments. The period of the moratorium should be used to debate the experimental,
ethical and legal aspects of germ line therapy in an open, transparent
and critical manner with a view to more clearly defining the opportunities and
risks of these technologies for man and nature, and to elaborating recommendations for future regulations. The goal of this analysis is to promote a discourse of this kind.
Research in Silicon Valley
(1998)
The article informs about historical developments and recent problems in the former wetlands of the Oderbruch, which has been cultivated for agricultural use for 300 years, and in the fen region of the Rhin-Havel-Luch. The periodically inundated floodplains of Oderbruch are characterised by rich-in-clay sedimentation soils, while Rhin-Havel-Luch is a year-round wet fen region with peat soils. In both areas land use necessarily requires an adequate regional water management, employing measures and system solutions for river training, dike construction, drainage and soil cultivation. Options for action and adaptation strategies for the next 20 to 40 years, based on many years of own analyses and case studies, are presented and discussed. The article also considers an aggravation of the problems to be expected from climate change.
This paper is an updated presentation of the Ramses project being currently developed at the University of Liège. The first section stresses the main objectives and gives a technical description of the general architecture of Ramses software. The second part describes the encoding procedures and reviews the current state of the annotation. In the third section, some changes brought about by the use of large-scale corpora are discussed from an epistemological viewpoint. The paper ends with the presentation of some new avenues for research that will ensue from the use of a complex multilevel corpus.
quoteSalute strives to make data of digital scholarly editions of letters (DSELs) accessible in a playful fashion by enabling users to integrate salutations from DSELs in their own email correspondence. The foundation of quoteSalute is a curated TEI-XML text corpus which has been created by extracting <salute>-tags from TEI-XML-encoded DSELs. For providing users with fitting salutations, we annotated the data regarding language, level of politeness and intended gender of sender and receiver.
When managing large quantities of data, it is a common solution to utilize a centralized data management software to forge a connection between metadata and the data objects themselves. In case of text-based objects without any attached metadata, it is easy for humans to contextualize these objects by recognizing patterns such as filenames, titles, authors etc. This task becomes a challenge when dealing with non-text-based objects like images in the cultural heritage domain. Without metadata or expert knowledge, it becomes difficult to estimate the creation date of a painting or tell the name of its painter. Thus, the ability to contextualize data depends on whether there is a working connection between the metadata store and the data object itself. This connection fails as soon as the file is moved on the file system without having these changes also applied in the corresponding
data base, or when the file is shared without a reference to its original location. This paper presents an approach to overcome that type of co-dependency by utilizing XMP to embed cultural heritage metadata directly into image files to ensure their location-independent long-term preservation. The “Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi” Germany (CVMA) project serves as an example use-case.
Agroecosystems are vital for supplying ecosystem services to human society, but most modern farming practices impact detrimentally on the environment. Public agricultural support policies have been critically important in influencing the transformation of the farm sectors; however, few of them have been dedicated to enhancing ecosystem services beyond agricultural commodities. The largest agricultural support system worldwide, the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), has now come to a critical point, as major decisions concerning its design and implementation after 2013 are about to be taken. The debate on this reform process presents a unique opportunity to trigger a transition from commodity-based subsidy policies to policies centered on efficient provision of ecosystem services from agricultural land. To prompt such discussion, we formulate key recommendations informed by a review of ecosystem services literature and address verifiable links to human well-being, non-market valuation for balanced services provision, treatment of ecosystem services bundles, site-specific and regionalized approaches, matching spatial scales for different ecosystem services, funding permanence for payment schemes, strong monitoring and adaptive approaches to tackling uncertainties, and coherent cross-sectoral policy design. If these issues were to be considered in formulating and implementing future CAP, it might become an exemplar for redirecting agricultural policies elsewhere in the world towards sustainability.
Most industrial countries have experienced a transformation of land use: from decreasing to expanding forest areas, the so-called forest transition. Outside closed forests, European rural landscapes exhibit a diversity of tree-based agricultural systems, but the question of whether this forest transition has also affected ‘trees outside forests’ has rarely been studied. The aim of this study is to analyze the spatial-temporal dynamics of farm trees and woodlands in an agricultural landscape in Eastern Germany from 1964 to 2008, based on aerial photographs and digital orthophotos. Taking a landscape ecological perspective, we quantify farm tree dynamics, disentangle processes of gain and loss in the socialist and post-socialist periods of Eastern Germany, and assess differences in ecosystem services provided by farm trees. A substantial increase of overall tree cover by 24.8% was observed for the selected time period, but trajectories have been disparate across different farm tree classes. The increase in tree cover was stronger in steep valleys than on hills and plateaus, indicating a significant interdependence between topography and trajectories of change. Patch numbers of farm trees did not increase, which suggests that the expansion of tree cover is mostly due to a spatial expansion of previously existing tree patches. Overall net gains in tree cover were rather similar during the socialist and post-socialist eras. The general increase in tree cover was accompanied by increases in agriculture-related ecosystem service provision, but the increase in pollination and pest control services was much lower than that in water purification services. These findings present the first empirical evidence from an industrialized country that there is also an ongoing ‘forest transition’ outside closed forests. Potential, partially counteracting drivers of change during the socialist and post-socialist periods have mainly been related to farm policies and the environmental consciousness of land users and society as a whole.
Eastern Mediterranean silvopastoral oak woodlands have been greatly damaged through forest conversion, illegal lumbering, overgrazing, and forest fires. The aim of this study was to assess land-use changes and the legacies that they have imprinted on the forest structure of Quercus macrolepis and accompanying Quercus pubescens and Quercus cerris woodlands on Lesvos Island, Greece. The size-structures of adult oak populations were analyzed as indicators of long-term oak regeneration, while short-term recruitment was determined by counting oak seedlings and saplings. The size-structure of the adult Q. macrolepis population was similar to the inverse J-shaped distribution typical for natural Mediterranean oak forests, indicating continuous recruitment with a constant mortality rate of mature individuals. Seedling and sapling densities were highly variable, but generally low in relation to adult oak densities. Recruitment of oak seedlings and saplings was positively related to determinants such as forest cover, adult oak density and basal area, woody plant richness, and litter cover. Both seedling and sapling occurrence was negatively associated with dung frequency, which suggests that sheep grazing imposes a barrier to oak recruitment. The study outlines a comprehensive land-use transition from the 1950s to the 1970s, during which a complex and multifunctional agrosilvopastoral land-use system was simplified to an intensive grazing system. The discrepancy between the successful long-term regeneration and the less successful short-term recruitment of oaks illustrates that intensified livestock grazing has been a major driver of vegetation change. Grazing impact is likely to interact with increasing drought conditions, which may trigger a negative feedback cycle that undermines the capacity of woodlands to sustain ecosystem services.
Numerous studies underline the importance of immaterial benefits provided by ecosystems and especially by cultural landscapes, which are shaped by intimate human–nature interactions. However, due to methodological challenges, cultural ecosystem services are rarely fully considered in ecosystem services assessments. This study performs a spatially explicit participatory mapping of the complete range of cultural ecosystem services and several disservices perceived by people living in a cultural landscape in Eastern Germany. The results stem from a combination of mapping exercises and structured interviews with 93 persons that were analyzed with statistical and GIS-based techniques. The results show that respondents relate diverse cultural services and multiple local-level sites to their individual well-being. Most importantly, aesthetic values, social relations and educational values were reported. Underlining the holistic nature of cultural ecosystem services, the results reveal bundles of services as well as particular patterns in the perception of these bundles for respondent groups with different socio-demographic backgrounds. Cultural services are not scattered randomly across a landscape, but rather follow specific patterns in terms of the intensity, richness and diversity of their provision. Resulting hotspots and coldspots of ecosystem services provision are related to landscape features and land cover forms. We conclude that, despite remaining methodological challenges, cultural services mapping assessments should be pushed ahead as indispensable elements in the management and protection of cultural landscapes. Spatially explicit information on cultural ecosystem services that incorporates the differentiated perceptions of local populations provides a rich basis for the development of sustainable land management strategies. These could realign the agendas of biodiversity conservation and cultural heritage preservation, thereby fostering multifunctionality.
The potential of agriculture, forestry, and other land uses to sequester carbon offers a powerful tool for controlling the global climate regime, but practices capable of creating “collateral” benefits for landscape conservation have thus far been disregarded. This paper calls for greater integration of scattered trees into agricultural landscapes, hypothesizing that agroforestry practices effectively store carbon and deliver other important ecosystem services as well. Several agroforests from the Upper Lusatia area in Eastern Germany have been selected for analysis. They cover relatively large areas of land (8.2%), even within this intensively used agricultural landscape, and their extent increased from 1964-2008 by 19.4%. Practices of conserving or promoting the six agroforest classes are compared with a catalogue of essential properties for becoming effective “carbon offset projects”. Criteria from mandatory and voluntary carbon markets for carbon sequestration are then applied (additionality, baselines, permanence, and carbon leakage). The study concludes that steps towards realization of “carbon sequestration projects” should include collecting empirical evidence regarding the carbon sequestration potential of temperate agroforestry systems, developing localised demonstration projects, and upscaling these projects to participate in established carbon markets.
This study explores the potential of historical maps to detect, measure and monitor changes of trees outside forests. The main goal is to assess local-level changes of scattered trees and orchards and their land-use determinants in two areas in Southern Germany between 1901/1905 and 2009. Firstly, overall landscape changes are recorded. Secondly, the spatial-temporal trajectories of scattered trees and their land-use determinants are identified. Thirdly, changes in quantity and fragmentation patterns of traditional orchards are analyzed in their relationship to overall land-cover change. The results confirm major losses in scattered trees, mainly due to urbanization, agricultural intensification, and land abandonment. They further reveal that, while orchards have persisted in total area, they have undergone critical changes towards a simplified landscape structure and loss of the traditional land-use mosaic, which is a characterizing feature of high nature value landscapes. Multi-temporal assessment showed that most trends have been continuous and did not change directions over time, but rather accelerated during periods of rapid change (most dramatically in the 1950-1990 period). The case of orchards and scattered trees illustrates a major problem of cultural landscapes in Europe: Semi-natural landscape features of high nature value are threatened by both intensification and abandonment of land uses. This makes their conservation a potentially costly enterprise, as both opportunity costs for lost alternative land uses and for conservation management costs arise.
Since humans are preferentially settling in flood plains they often influence freshwater systems intensely. The first signs of anthropogenic impacts on surface waters in the Berlin-Brandenburg region are approximately 3000 years old. Considering the multiple and intense human uses of surface waters in this region, we analysed when, how and to which extent regional rivers and streams became impacted by dams, water mills and fish weirs resulting in changes in morphology, hydrology and ecological functioning. We hypothesise that the development and growth of cities in this region necessitated (1) efficient navigability of rivers linking them, (2) efficient use of hydropower resources for mills, and (3) significant pollution of surface waters especially with the beginning of industrial development. We analyse these hypotheses by means of three regional examples and delineate the effects of human uses on selected surface water bodies. Understanding the effects of these historic modifications of surface water supports the identification of options for a sustainable use of surface waters that are currently still subjected to multiple uses but face a significant decrease in discharge due to climate change.
Early-career funding in German-African academic cooperation: achievements, challenges, perspectives
(2024)
This paper analyses experiences, challenges and potentials in German-African academic cooperation in the field of early-career funding considering the humanities and social sciences as well as natural sciences and medicine. It is based on a comprehensive overview of existing German funding formats and an exemplary survey of the experiences of African cooperation partners with these programmes. The authors propose the establishment of an interface between academic research, the practice of science funding, and African researchers. According to the authors, such a contact and information point would contribute to the improvement of German-African science cooperation and be an important element of Germany’s scientific diplomacy in the long term. This paper is the English translation of Denkanstoß 13 (2023): Early-Career-Förderung in der deutsch-afrikanischen Wissenschaftskooperation. Leistungen, Herausforderungen, Perspektiven. Berlin.
For decades, water resources have been used intensively for drinking water, industry, agriculture and energy production. This paper summarises the main anthropogenic influences on the water cycle in a Pleistocene landscape and associated geochemical reactions. The results allow the identification and description of the main hydraulic and geochemical processes that control water and solute fluxes in different hydrological compartments, in particular recharge and discharge regions. Under progressive climate change, this process-based knowledge should be used to adapt land and water management to minimise negative impacts on hydrological resources and stabilise the regional water balance in theBerlin-Brandenburg Pleistocene landscape. Based on these results, a risk assessment approach for validation of future management strategies under changing climate conditions is presented.
The future of biological diversity in a crowded world (Ernst Mayr Lecture on 29th October 2002)
(2006)
The Swedish Academy Dictionary (SAOB) is one of the big national dictionary projects started in the 19th century. SAOB is still in production – there are another two volumes out of 38 to printed before 2018. The structure inside the volumes is (of course) varied/varying. There are ten chief editors and five generations of editors involved in the project. In the 1980s the SAOB was OCR-scanned. The result was used for a webversion in the internet from 1997. The webversion is very frequently used but has a lot of shortcomings due to, among other things, a great typographic complexity and a scanning technology of the time. Now the editorial board is discussing the future: redigitalization (in China), updating of the webversion with new search tools, updating of the dictionary itself and some form of editing tool.
A reaction to the article „The Lost Archive“, The Wall Street Journal 12.1.2008, page 1 (US edition) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120008793352784631.html The belief in the myth that old manuscripts should be mysterious and powerful is part and parcel of the age of Modernity. That such expectations were operative in the discussion on the Qumran fragments is still remembered, and more recently the Da Vinci Code, in itself a quite shallow story, sold extremely well. The fact that the Wall Street Journal placed an article on the “lost Bergsträsser-film archive” of Qur’anic manuscripts on its front page on 12th of January seems to be due to the myth of “textual wars” taking place in the world.
Emergence, analysis and optimization of structures - Concepts and strategies across disciplines
(2007)
The study of structures is a common concern of all scientific disciplines. The motivation as well as the methods of analysis, however, differ considerably. In engineering, the generation of artifacts, of infrastructures or technological processes are of primary interest. Frequently, the analysis aims at an optimization of the structures and the structure generating processes. Quite different is the study and explanation of existing structures in biology and the social sciences. Here the question of optimality does not present itself in an unambiguous manner. Generally, it must be questioned whether biological and social structures, although developing in an evolutionary way, can be considered as leading towards an a-priori defineable goal of optimality. The complex scenario of qualitative and quantitative modeling, and the goal-oriented and statistical approaches to understanding the meliorisation efforts in the various fields of the sciences and humanities define the scope of this book. Its intention is to create trans-disciplinary insights into methods to fecundate the custom disciplinary approaches.
Climate change is expected to increase water scarcity in northeast Germany. Land-use change is one of the options of mitigation that is intensely discussed in this region. This review aims at giving a compilation of existing data and modelling studies in order to investigate the potential and the limits of the land-use change approach.
My essay attends to a number of passages in Alexander von Humboldt’s "Personal Narrative" in which the Prussian explorer expresses anxiety about the apparent dangers posed by the overwhelmingly productive tropical landscapes he observes. In these passages, the excesses of an “exotic nature” threaten European identity and modes of civilization—and they trouble the accuracy of Humboldt’s own observational project. I also explore Humboldt’s related worry that South American vegetable (and visual) overload will exert a destabilizing effect on his aesthetic sensibility, disrupting his ability to represent the “New Continent” accurately in writing. Finally, I sketch the influence of Humboldt’s representations of tropical excess on nineteenth-century British cultural thought and literary practice. Studying the instabilities experienced by "Personal Narrative’s" expatriates and colonists promises to draw out important tensions latent in Humboldt’s treatment of tropical landscape and to illuminate broader epistemological and aesthetic shifts being worked out during the period.
Current financial and monetary difficulties in Europe are overshadowing the issue of a lack of common European identity. 200 years of nation states seem to have suppressed 1800 years of a history shaped by mutual enrichment in politics, science and the arts – a European cultural heritage. It is for the humanities and social sciences (SSH) to research, document and preserve this heritage, where the European science academies play a major role. However, a pan-European research programme on European cultural heritage and identity is still lacking, and, in comparison to the rest of the European SSH research landscape, the science academies are terra incognita. This book provides an analytical report of the first survey of basic research in the SSH conducted by the European scientific academies and related research organisations. It not only provides greatly needed information about this important area of the European research landscape, but also investigates the potential for a pan-European academies’ research programme in the SSH (including a corresponding digital infrastructure) that could strengthen the integration of European research into cultural heritage and identity. The main topic of this publication is the working practices of the projects surveyed with a focus on: o the science academies of Europe o research fields and topics o running times and funding o staff and early-stage researchers o research sites and access to research material o digital research practices o publication, dissemination and visibility o international collaboration o project evaluation
Berlin Text System 3.1 User Manual : Editorial Software of the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae Project
(2018)
The Berlin Text System (BTS) Version 3.1 manual introduces a Java-based software designed for editing and annotating Ancient Egyptian texts. BTS integrates a CouchDB database and an Elastic search engine to support its main components: Text Editor, Lemma List, Thesaurus, and Abstract Text.
The Text Editor facilitates transliteration, translation, lemmatization, and annotations, allowing for detailed lexical and grammatical analysis. Hieroglyphic transcriptions can be entered via a specialized Hieroglyph Type Writer based on JSesh.
The Lemma List ist ready to contain pre-Coptic lemmata, divided into Hieroglyphic/Hieratic and Demotic scripts, providing comprehensive entries with passport data, transliterations, and translations.
The Thesaurus allows for metadata enrichment of texts with controlled vocabulary for consistent data management, supporting contextual analysis through structured metadata.
The manual covers BTS's user interface, including menu bar, toolbar, status bar, and workspace, divided into views for each main component. Features like Revision History for tracking and restoring versions, indexing, and search capabilities enhance user efficiency. BTS is a powerful tool for the study and preservation of Ancient Egyptian texts, integrating advanced database and search technologies with specialized textual analysis tools.
Even a reductionist attempt to define scholarship is clearly fraught with difficulty, but an idealised historical lexicographer-cum-scholar must obviously have – inter alia and at the very least – a profound linguistic and textual knowledge of the language being documented, an ability to understand texts in their historical context and to analyse the meaning or function of lexical items as used in context, an ability to synthesise the results through generalisation and abstraction and to formulate them in a way that is both accurate, i.e. reflects actual usage, and user- or reader-friendly, i.e. is comprehensible to the user/reader. S/he must have encyclopedic or world knowledge and literary skills in order to understand general content words and explain their meaning and their semantic shifts perhaps over many centuries, and technical expertise to understand specialist terms and define their use in specific contexts, again perhaps over time. In respect of etymology s/he must not only have knowledge of older stages of the language and an ability to reconstruct unattested forms, but also knowledge of the other languages that have impacted on the language being documented, or at least familiarity with the scholarly historical dictionaries of those languages. That is a tall order indeed, impossibly tall for any one person today given today‘s demands on and expectations of lexicographers. Teams which include specialists in different areas or at least have access to consultants in such areas alongside generalists are needed if scholarly standards are to be met. The standard of scholarship is primarily a factor of the number and range as well as the knowledge and experience of the lexicographers, as is in large measure the pace of production. In this regard, it cannot be emphasised enough that scholarly historical lexicography of high quality is and will remain very time consuming.
Even a reductionist attempt to define scholarship is clearly fraught with difficulty, but an idealised historical lexicographer-cum-scholar must obviously have – inter alia and at the very least – a profound linguistic and textual knowledge of the language being documented, an ability to understand texts in their historical context and to analyse the meaning or function of lexical items as used in context, an ability to synthesise the results through generalisation and abstraction and to formulate them in a way that is both accurate, i.e. reflects actual usage, and user- or reader-friendly, i.e. is comprehensible to the user/reader. S/he must have encyclopedic or world knowledge and literary skills in order to understand general content words and explain their meaning and their semantic shifts perhaps over many centuries, and technical expertise to understand specialist terms and define their use in specific contexts, again perhaps over time. In respect of etymology s/he must not only have knowledge of older stages of the language and an ability to reconstruct unattested forms, but also knowledge of the other languages that have impacted on the language being documented, or at least familiarity with the scholarly historical dictionaries of those languages. That is a tall order indeed, impossibly tall for any one person today given today‘s demands on and expectations of lexicographers. Teams which include specialists in different areas or at least have access to consultants in such areas alongside generalists are needed if scholarly standards are to be met. The standard of scholarship is primarily a factor of the number and range as well as the knowledge and experience of the lexicographers, as is in large measure the pace of production. In this regard, it cannot be emphasised enough that scholarly historical lexicography of high quality is and will remain very time consuming.
Die Erscheinungsform einer bestimmten Einzelsprache resultiert aus dem Nebeneinander und Zusammenwirken vertikaler und horizontaler Transmission von sprachlichen Merkmalen und umfasst demzufolge normalerweise neben Phänomenen, die über eine Kette früherer Sprechergenerationen ererbt wurden, auch solche, die aus anderen Sprachen entlehnt wurden. Deutliche Spuren einer komplexen Entstehungsgeschichte und der Interaktion verschiedener Sprachgemeinschaften lassen sich nicht erst im Altägyptischen oder gar erst in der Sprache des Neuen Reiches ausmachen, sondern bereits die frühesten schriftlichen Quellen aus der Zeit um 3000 v. Chr. erlauben – trotz ihrer Knappheit – überraschende Einblicke in die zeitgenössischen sprachlichen Verhältnisse. Bislang nur durch Sprachvergleich rekonstruierbare Entwicklungen sind nunmehr historisch nachweisbar, und das phonologische System einer dem Altägyptischen vorausgehenden und erheblich von ihm abweichenden Sprachstufe wird greifbar. Da das Voraltägyptische ein für eine afroasiatische Sprache eher untypisches Konsonanteninventar besitzt und sich zudem lexikalische Übereinstimmungen (nicht-genetischer Natur) mit indoeuropäischen Sprachen abzeichnen, erscheinen fundierte Hypothesen über die Herausbildung des Ägyptischen nicht länger unmöglich. Damit wäre das Ägyptische nicht nur die am längsten bezeugte Einzelsprache der Menschheitsgeschichte, sondern wohl auch die einzige, die von ihrer Entstehung bis zu ihrem Aussterben schriftlich dokumentiert ist.
Virtually all conventional text-based natural language processing techniques - from traditional information retrieval systems to full-fledged parsers - require reference to a fixed lexicon accessed by surface form, typically trained from or constructed for synchronic input text adhering strictly to contemporary orthographic conventions. Unconventional input such as historical text which violates these conventions therefore presents difficulties for any such system due to lexical variants present in the input but missing from the application lexicon. To facilitate the extension of synchronically-oriented natural language processing techniques to historical text while minimizing the need for specialized lexical resources, one may first attempt an automatic canonicalization of the input text. This paper provides an informal overview of the various canonicalization techniques currently employed by the Deutsches Textarchiv project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities to prepare a corpus of historical German text for part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, and integration into a robust online information retrieval system.
Introduction
(2019)
Global change is posing a major challenge to existing forms of natural resource use, socio-economic development and institutional regulation. Although trends such as climate change, socio-economic transformation and institutional change are global in their scope, they have very specific regional outcomes. Regionally distinct coping strategies are required which take into account both the diversity of regional impacts of global change and the local contexts of appropriate responses. This paper explores the impacts of global change on the management of water infrastructure systems in the Berlin-Brandenburg region in terms of three concurrent and overlapping challenges: climate change, socio-economic change and institutional change. It subsequently examines how regional actors in the water sector are addressing these three dimensions of global change.