On a chilly February morning in Lille, I once more found myself heading to Germany to present at the Connecting Late Antiquities conference in Bonn. What had originally been planned as a whole team trip had over the weeks been gradually whittled down to just me by illness and other realities, and myself would not have made it if not for Ekaterina speedily finding me train tickets when my bus didn’t turn up!
As I presented early on the first day, I was able to relax for most of the conference and enjoy hearing other papers and speaking with the assembled academics about their research. I was particularly struck by the breadth of interests and backgrounds of researchers, which really highlighted the conference’s aims to create a greater understanding of the database resources already in existence and foster a network of researchers working in the late antique digital humanities whose findings and advances could be drawn on to integrate and maintain other projects.
My own presentation highlighted questions of ambiguity within the Ex-Patria corpus, and asked what approaches we should take when deciding what to include and how to do it. The question of how far to cast our net was a theme of many presentations over the two-and-a-half-day event. How should we include anonymous groups in our databases, such as slaves and the lower classes? What of animals? Should supernatural events, considered real by many of the subjects we study, have entries in our database? These questions and more have circulated in the Ex-Patria team since the conference ended, and I am sure that the seeds planted in Bonn will bear fruit across the border in Lille as we continue to construct our database