The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative is
pleased to provide an update on recent additions to our collections. We
are grateful to see colleagues making such extensive use of the new
features to expand the catalogue, furthering the availability of more
and better open research to a global user community. With considerable
delay, we also take this chance to thank everyone who found the room in
their busy schedules to drop by the CDLI and ORACC drop-in session at
the 69th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (RAI) in Helsinki in
July - and to the conference organisers and staff for making the entire
conference such a wonderful experience!
During the third quarter of 2024, around 4,300 submissions and
additions to artifact transliterations, translations, imagery, metadata,
and related entities have been received and accepted for publication. A
full listing of all update events since 1 July 2024, as well as their
contributors and authors, can be found here: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/update-events?created_after=2024-06-30&created_before=2024-10-01
Here, the editors would like to express their particular gratitude to
Tohru Ozaki for his immense contributions to the catalogue. For several
years now, Tohru Ozaki has been systematically re-reading the old
transcriptions of the mass of Ur III texts available on the CDLI.
Several thousand Ur III texts have already been corrected in this way,
and work continues with the CDLI staff to constantly improve the
transcriptions available. On his CDLI author page, you can find the flow
of curated editions from Ozaki’s suggestions uploaded and with further
careful curation by Bertrand Lafont https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/authors/1050 (see list of contributions at the bottom of the page).
For this edition of our newsletter, we would also like to highlight
recent efforts to update and clean the bibliography of the CDLI. Since
January 2024, Richard Firth has worked tirelessly to clean and merge
incomplete and duplicate records, which has reduced our publications
table from more than 100,000 records to less than 18,000 records. During
the summer of 2024, uploads of the project bibliography of the
Geomapping Landscapes of Writing (GLoW) of Uppsala University has been
completed, adding another ca. 2,000 records to the bibliography
database. A growing number of these records also include DOI identifiers
and, where available, links to free online versions of the pertinent
publication.
Publications can be searched here: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/publications,
but are also accessible for consultation and download on the main
search and on an artifact’s page. The full bibliography can also be
retrieved through the CDLI API, through our API client (https://github.com/cdli-gh/framework-api-client).
Thanks to support from the Getty Director’s fund, Joseph Barber,
Christie Carr, and Gustavo Fernandes Pedroso have assembled more than
1750 fatcrosses of unpublished images of Louvre artifacts, totaling 48
GB of archival composite images under the management of Jacob Dahl at
the University of Oxford. Those images are now online for everyone’s
perusal. They include photos of texts that many of us have only been
able to study through the published lineart in the past. The original
images were produced during the ”Creating a Sustainable Cuneiform
Digital Library” (2011-2015) project funded by the Mellon Foundation and
expertly captured by Klaus Wagensonner.
We also have uploaded the remaining images of seals from Oxford’s
Ashmolean Museum, images of more than 1100 seals from the British
Museum, and additional images of the Kassite seals from the Yale
Babylonian collection, captured by Oxford DPhil student Lara Bampfield,
in the course of her research on Old Babylonian and Kassite period
seals. These seals were captured using line scan technologies and the
images are offered double the usual density of pixels so anyone can
examine minute details from the surface of the seals. Many of these
photos will showcase annotations. See, for example, https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/473134/reader/238411
(zoom in for extra detail and click on “Show annotations” to see
annotations). Lara’s work on cylinder seals was also supported by the
Getty Director’s Fund.
We would also like to thank Joe Barber and Lara Bampfield for
preparing images-related guides: “Generating a fatcross in Adobe
Photoshop” for the manual processing of tablet scans at https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/docs/images-acquisition-and-processing#content-generating-a-fatcross-in-adobe-photoshop and “Files renaming” for batch renaming files useful in image work: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/docs/images-acquisition-and-processing#content-files-renaming.
Additionally, thanks to lead programmer Lars Willighagen, it is now
possible to see owner and license information close to digital assets on
the site. A feature for providing credits for individuals participating
in the digitisation process, and linking lineart (and photos) to their
publication, will also be added soon. In the coming months, we will be
working hard in publishing this information granularly based on the
different agreements and licenses used by image owners, which at this
time generally displays based on the default that photos belong to
collections and original line art to the publication author or publisher
it was published in.
Lars Willighagen has recently deployed the beta CDLI SPARQL endpoint
with a snapshot of the CDLI data from October 15. At this time, URIs are
not stable (we will announce an official release when they are stable),
and the structure of the graph might evolve. Interested users can use
our new lightweight custom endpoint client made available on the CDLI
site at https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/resources/sparql. Interface documentation is available at https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/docs/sparql-interface
(see the test queries!). We welcome any comments and suggestions
regarding the cdli graph. Data consumers can reach the endpoint directly
at https://cdli.utoronto.ca/sparql
with renewed thanks to Professor Heather Baker and the Digital Research
Alliance of Canada for their support with the resources necessary for
this deployment.
Finally, the API was improved under the hood to achieve faster
downloads, and to improve the structure of the linked data. The API
client (https://github.com/cdli-gh/framework-api-client/)
was updated to be more resilient in case of intermittent failures and
to provide more information during the download and when a lasting
problem does occur. Users of the API client should make sure to update
their local installation of the client to fully enjoy these benefits.
Altogether, this means it is now possible to download the entire catalog
as linked data or as a CSV file without too much trouble.
Below are current statistics for the main tables of the CDLI as of 30 September 2024:
- Artifacts (https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts): 368,735 records
- Artifact records with images: 139,287
- Artifact records with lineart: 86,627
- Artifact records with transliterations: 151,024
- Artifact records with translations: 5,568
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.
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. 16.000 visits per month generating an average 157.000
page views.
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
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