The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative participated in Google's Summer of Code program this year, which pairs students with open source programming projects.
One of the projects was to make cuneiform transcriptions and translations from its the extensive database available in TEI-XML laid out in the file hierarchy described by the Canonical Text Services model used by digital humanities projects working with texts from the ancient world.
This makes a broad set of tools developed for analysis of historical texts available to Assyriologists. The CTS standard is the basis for the new Scaife reading environment developed for the Perseus Open Greek and Latin project, which provides easy and intuitive access to the corpus for reading, cross-reference, and comparison.
CDLI publishes under an open data model. By supporting common formats, we can make use of common tools across multiple scholarly communities, allowing scholars and students to access and build on the data in new ways. A new export repository is available with a subset of the complete corpus for any researchers who want to try it out.
In the future we hope to further develop this reader to allow for inter-linear translations, include metadata from the object catalog, and link to tablet images (when available). The Scaife project represents the valuable investment and cooperation in open-source technologies for the study of the ancient world. We're excited to be working with our colleagues in the Greco-Roman classics to facilitate the dissemination of ancient texts.
CDLI was one of 204 organizations awarded participation in this year's Summer of Code program. Five students were selected and participated with the project this year.
Ralph Giles, student, Google Summer of Code.
Willis Monroe, mentor. Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia.
Émilie Pagé-Perron, Co-Principal Investigator, Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative.
Date: 2019/08/30