Dear colleagues,

we would like to invite you to a conference at the new Karman Center for
Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Bern, Switzerland,
to be held from 10–11 November 2006, on the occasion of the Karman Center’
s research project on the Pantheon which was instigated in 2005. For more
information about the project and the conference, please refer to our
website:

http://www.karmancenter.unibe.ch/pantheon

To open up new opportunities for in-house and external
mulit-disciplinary research on the Pantheon one of the means of the Karman
Center’s project is to create a web-based research network by establishing
an online data resource in which as much information (text, graphics,
photographs and other images) as possible is collated.

The project was launched in December 2005 when the entire Pantheon was
scanned using advanced laser technology, from which a data set of
541,000,000 measuring points was created. We are currently working on
transforming the data into a three-dimensional digital model of the
building.

Another important objective of the Pantheon Project, and of the Karman
Center as a whole, is to promote free and open access to materials for the
scientific community. To this end, the Pantheon Project wishes to foster
international and multidisciplinary collaboration among scholars in
different fields in order to encourage research on the building.

Therefore, this conference will bring together scholars from many
disciplines – archaeology, art and architectural history, history of
construction, engineering etc. – to examine the main issues concerning the
Pantheon and the perspectives for future research.

We would be delighted if you could participate in the conference by
contributing a paper discussing the latest findings on the Pantheon and/or
open questions in your field or in other fields of study, including – if
possible – suggestions as to how to solve these issues with the help of a
collaborative network.

Michael Heinzelmann / Markus Wäfler / Gerd Graßhoff
Institute of Archaeology / Institute for Philosophy