Friday, November 29, 2024

CDLI Newsletter 2024/2: September 2024

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!

Recent contributions

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).

Updated bibliography

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).

New images and licensing information

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.

Linked Open Data features

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.

API improvements

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.

Current catalogue statistics

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

New publications and papers

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.

Visitor statistics

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

October 01, 2024
Posted by Rattenborg, Rune

 

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