Making Global Philosophical Sources Visible: HePS in Dialogue with Experts on Digital Access to Cultural Goods
Presentation of the HePS Initiative at the University of Münster
Leon Krings and Rolf Elberfeld
4 May 2026, University of Münster
“Access to Cultural Assets in the Digital Age”
Center for Advanced Studies
On 4 May 2026, Prof. Dr. Rolf Elberfeld and Dr. Leon Krings presented the Hildesheim Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sources (HePS) at the University of Münster’s Center for Advanced Studies “Access to Cultural Goods in the Digital Age.” The guest lecture, entitled “Hildesheim Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sources (HePS): An open-access digital infrastructure for the documentation, interconnection, and visualization of philosophical sources and traditions from around the world,” took place as part of the Center’s Jour fixe series.
The Münster Center, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), investigates how digital transformation changes the conditions of access to cultural goods, including works of art, archives, collections, museums, and the results of scientific research. Against this background, HePS was discussed as a digital-humanities infrastructure project that aims to make philosophical sources, traditions, concepts, practices, persons, places, and institutions accessible in new ways.
In his presentation, Leon Krings introduced the basic concept, current state, and future research potential of HePS. The project aims to develop an open, multilingual, semantically connected data infrastructure for philosophical sources worldwide. Rather than reproducing a fixed canon, HePS is conceived as a dynamically expanding knowledge graph that can document and visualize relations between sources, thinkers, concepts, traditions, languages, institutions, and places.
The HePS initiative seeks to support a polycentric understanding of the history of philosophy without a single geographical, linguistic, cultural, or conceptual center. A central concern of HePS is to make marginalized and underrepresented traditions more visible: from African, Latin American, Oceanic, and Indigenous philosophies to women philosophers, oral traditions, and embodied practices such as meditation. In this sense, HePS contributes to questioning the Eurocentrism of conventional reference works and to developing new forms of decolonial, intercultural, and polylogical philosophical research.
The presentation also highlighted concrete use cases and visualization scenarios. These included possible conceptual networks of relational epistemologies and ontologies across different world regions, the reconstruction of complex translation chains such as the transmission of Dharmakīrti’s works from Sanskrit through Tibetan, Oirat, Russian, and English contexts, and the comparative documentation of structurally analogous knowledge systems such as the Yorùbá Ifá corpus and the Chinese Yijing. Such examples show how HePS could allow researchers to ask questions that conventional bibliographies, encyclopedias, and disciplinary reference systems often cannot adequately address.
In its current development phase, HePS is closely connected to the work of the Center for Advanced Studies “Philosophizing in a Globalized World” at the University of Hildesheim. The project draws on the research of GloPhi’s fellows, language-focus groups, workshops, lecture series, and international networks. It is also being developed in cooperation with the Open Science Lab at TIB Hannover and is planned as an open, FAIR, linked-open-data infrastructure based on Wikibase4Research.
The discussion in Münster focused not only on technical and infrastructural questions, but also on the broader philosophical implications of digital access: How can global philosophical traditions be documented without reproducing old hierarchies? How can databases become tools for collaborative, plural, and critically self-reflexive research? And how can philosophical knowledge be made accessible while preserving the complexity, plurality, and situatedness of its sources?
By presenting HePS in Münster, GloPhi continued its ongoing dialogue with research initiatives concerned with access, digital infrastructures, cultural goods, and the transformation of knowledge in a globalized world.
