Humanities researchers today work across a fragmented landscape of digital tools. Citation managers know nothing about manuscript images. Transcription software has no connection to the writing environment. Collection metadata lives in spreadsheets that no other application can read. The result is not merely inconvenience; it is a structural barrier to the kind of cross-referencing, discovery, and synthesis that scholarship demands. The Playfair Suite takes a different approach: a family of desktop applications for collection and source management (Playfair), academic writing (Scribe), manuscript analysis (Quire), OCR and transcription (Almanak), and prosopographical work (Proso), all built on a shared data layer. At the centre sits Playfair, which manages sources, entities, and metadata across the entire research lifecycle, and makes them available to every other application through embeddable views and a common interface. A citation entered in Playfair is immediately accessible while writing in Scribe. A manuscript catalogued in Playfair carries its metadata into analysis in Quire. This talk introduces the architecture and vision of the Playfair Suite, demonstrates the integration between Playfair and Scribe, and asks what a truly integrated research environment could mean for humanities scholarship.

Die „Digital Humanities“ sind eine der wichtigsten Entwicklungen im Bereich der Geisteswissenschaften in den letzten zehn Jahren und stellen einen Paradigmenwechsel dar. Die zunehmende Verfügbarkeit digitaler Quellen und Werkzeuge zu deren Auswertung beeinflusst die geisteswissenschaftliche Forschung maßgeblich. Als größte außeruniversitäre Forschungseinrichtung im Bereich der Geisteswissenschaften im Raum Berlin/Brandenburg stellt dieser Paradigmenwechsel auch für die Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW) eine große Herausforderung dar.