The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative is pleased to provide an update on recent additions to our collections and data model, auguring quarterly newsletters following an extensive period of development and testing of the new framework. The directors are pleased to see so many colleagues making use of the new features to expand the catalogue, in turn helping to make more and better data on cuneiform inscriptions freely available to researchers and the general public around the world.
During the first two quarters of 2024, numerous submissions and additions to artifact transliterations, translations, imagery, metadata, and related entities have been made, contributed by or credited to more than fifty individuals. A full listing of all update events since the beginning of the year, as well as their contributors and authors, can be found here: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/update-events?created_after=2024-01-01&created_before=2024-06-15
Among these many and valuable contributions to the catalogue, we would like to highlight the continued efforts of Richard Firth towards the expansion of artifact data on seals and publications; Tohru Ozaki for supplying an immense number of annotations; Bram Jagersma for his untiring work on cleaning and augmenting publications data; Eleanor Robson for addition of catalogue data drawn from her publication of texts from Tell Khaiber; Christian W. Hess for numerous updates to data on sign lists currently in the collections of the British Museum; and Jakob Jan de Ridder for expanding data collections on Middle Assyrian and Middle Babylonian inscriptions.
A special mention is due to University of Oxford students Christie Carr, Barış Özdemir, and Jessica Dowton, who have contributed catalogue updates, transliterations and translations in the past months, especially working on updates of literary compositions.
Next to individual additions submitted through our standard upload features, we would also like to acknowledge contributions to the database from various collaborators. Nancy Highcock of the Ashmolean Museum is providing updates to complete records on all inscribed objects held by the museum. Also, with the aid of the Geomapping Landscapes of Writing (GLoW) of Uppsala University, the collections index (https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/collections) has recently been updated to include geographical coordinates from Geonames for some 300 collections around the world, including most public and private museums.
Support from GLoW has also made possible the development of significant new features for managing bibliographical information (https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/publications). As recently communicated (https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/postings/215), the development of a new interface for publications data now allows registered users to add and edit full bibliographical references to the catalogue and link individual cuneiform artifacts to these publications with exact page and siglum reference, if available. All additions and edits will be credited to registered users and logged as part of the editorial history of the pertinent publication and artifact records.
We are in the process of uploading the remaining images of seals from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and images of more than 1100 seals from the British Museum, captured by Oxford DPhil student Lara Bampfield in the course of her research on Old Babylonian and Kassite period seals. Apart from the processing of seals we have also added visual annotations to some seals, and expect to upload large numbers of annotations of seals in the near future. Images with annotations can be filtered using the standard filter function on the left-hand bar of the CDLI search page. Annotations (eg. “cup” or “king”) are searchable through the standard and advanced search functions. Together with Abhishek Dutta from the Visual Geometry Group at Oxford we are also preparing automated annotations of seals (see here for a prototype of our work https://meru.robots.ox.ac.uk/pixee/projects/1f5d40dd-4c3a-4cfa-aaa7-beb400d38afe/test.html).
Below are current statistics for the main tables of the CDLI as of 12 June 2024:
Our publication series includes the Cuneiform Digital Library Journal, the Cuneiform Digital Library Bulletin, the Cuneiform Digital Library Notes, and the Cuneiform Digital Library Preprints. For new issues, please see the Publications tab on https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de.
If interested in knowing more about current and upcoming features of the CDLI platform, please join the Digital and Open Assyriology sessions at the 69th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (RAI) in Helsinki 8-12 July 2024. Editors and associates of the CDLI will be presenting a paper entitled “We got cuneiform, do you? How to collaborate on the CDLI Framework” on Thursday 11 July as part of session 9d (14.00-15.30 local time).
With the immaculate assistance of the conference organisers, we are also happy to invite participants to come by our drop-in Q&A-sessions in the Urbarium of the University of Helsinki City Centre Campus, Porthania Building, on Thursday 11 July from 9.00-12.30. Editors from the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) and the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC) will be present to introduce features of both platforms, and to answer all of the questions and queries that you may have.
In accordance with European Union and UK GDPR regulations, the CDLI does not track individual users of the platform. We do, however, monitor the number of unique visitors and page views and are happy to report that the CDLI is currently receiving an average of ca. 20.000 visits per month generating an average 180.000 page views. Close to 25% of these are returning visitors.
As a resource dedicated to enabling full and open access to cuneiform sources for everyone across the globe, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative is dependent on feedback, contributions and corrections from users. Input from our user community continues to generate improvements to the CDLI framework and user interface. Anyone is welcome to create an account (https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/register) and email us to request crowdsourcing privilege (mailto:cdli@ames.ox.ac.uk).
On behalf of the CDLI
Jacob Dahl, Bertrand Lafont, Émilie Pagé-Perron, and Rune Rattenborg
June 14, 2024
Posted by Rattenborg, Rune
