The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (www.isb-sib.ch) provides world-class bioinformatics databases, software tools, services and training to the international life science community in academia and industry. These solutions allow life scientists to turn the exponentially growing amount of data into knowledge. Here, we provide an overview of SIB's resources and competence areas, with a strong focus on curated databases and SIB's most popular and widely used resources. In particular, SIB's Bioinformatics resource portal ExPASy features over 150 resources, including UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, ENZYME, PROSITE, neXtProt, STRING, UniCarbKB, SugarBindDB, SwissRegulon, EPD, arrayMap, Bgee, SWISS-MODEL Repository, OMA, OrthoDB and other databases, which are briefly described in this article.

Research data in the humanities needs to be sustainable, and access to digital resources must be possible over a long period. Only if these prerequisites are fulfilled can research data be used as a source for other projects. In addition, reliability is a fundamental requirement so that digital sources can be cited, reused, and quoted. To address this problem, we present our solution: the Data and Service Center for the Humanities located in Switzerland. The centralized infrastructure is based on flexible and extendable software that is in turn reliant on modern technologies. Such an approach allows for the straightforward migration of existing research project databases with limited life spans in the humanities. We will demonstrate the basic concepts behind this proposed solution and our first experiences in the application thereof.

No abstract

The digital revolution makes one attentive to a "blind spot" of modernity, the influence of the material support of writing on ideas and concepts. Modernity has led us to "believe" in the existence of "works" and "ideas" independently of their concrete expressions in the supports of writing. Such beliefs have deeply influenced modern methodologies, and among them the biblical methodological approaches. The digital revolution reminds one to take a humble attitude to our ideas, and also to our attachment to literary "works", paying attention to the texts as documents and objects. Starting from this general idea, this article considers first the impact of some modern beliefs on Classical studies. The second part of this article argues that digital culture can particularly help us to rediscover a culture with plural literacies.