On the 12th of February, Google announced the organizations that have been selected to participate in the company's annual student coding outreach initiative. The Google Summer of Code (GSoC ) pairs students with an expert mentor to introduce them to the open source community, and to provide guidance while they work on a real world open source project. Since 2005, over 13,000 students from 108 countries have participated. As the result of an application to Google prepared by two of us (Pagé-Perron & Trikande), the CDLI was one of the 212 organizations selected for 2018 (for a full list, see , specific to CDLI ).
CDLI seeks to spread the practice of open access, open data, and open source, in support of shared knowledge and research reproducibility. offers a description of our current work; an overview of the tools we use in analyzing cuneiform text artifacts and presenting them to the research and informal learner public; and a list of potential project ideas for students interested in participating in CDLI's camp at GSoC. CDLI's pool of available mentors cover expertise in PHP; Python; natural language processing (NLP); data management and visualization; neural and statistical machine learning employed for computer vision and NLP; and (linguistic) linked open data. The outcomes of these mentorships should assist us to advance our capacity to process and showcase, in new and insightful ways, data derived from ancient artifacts, thus making our shared cultural heritage accessible to wider audiences—and we hope the program will introduce a diverse, cross-national set of young minds to our vision of cyberscholarship in furtherance of the charter of the humanities to facilitate a more creative, and critical view of the world.
Robert K. Englund, CDLI Director
Émilie Pagé-Perron, CDLI Co-PI
Saurabh Trikande, CDLI Technical Product Manager