Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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One major project to recently emerge from the CDLI is the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus
(Oracc). 86 This project has grown out of the CDLI and has utilized technology developed by the
Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (PSD). 87 Accord<strong>in</strong>g to its website, Oracc was created by Steve
T<strong>in</strong>ney, Eleanor Robson, and Niek Veldhuis and “comprises a workspace and toolkit for the
development of a complete corpus of cuneiform whose rich annotation and open licens<strong>in</strong>g support the
next generation of scholarly research.” In addition to CDLI and PSD, a number of other digital
cuneiform projects are <strong>in</strong>volved <strong>in</strong> Oracc, 88 <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g Assyrian Empire Builders (AEB), 89 the Digital
Corpus of Cuneiform Mathematical Texts (DCCMT), 90 and the Geography of Knowledge <strong>in</strong> Assyria
and Babylonia (GKAB). 91 Oracc was designed as a “corpus build<strong>in</strong>g cooperative” that will provide
both <strong>in</strong>frastructure and technical support for “the creation of free onl<strong>in</strong>e editions of cuneiform texts.”
S<strong>in</strong>ce Oracc wishes to promote both open and reusable data, they recommend that all participat<strong>in</strong>g
projects make use of Creative Commons (CC) 92 licens<strong>in</strong>g, and all default Oracc projects have been
placed under a CC “Attribution-Share Alike” license. Oracc was designed to complement the CDLI
and allows scholars to “slice” groups of texts from the larger CDLI corpus and then study those
<strong>in</strong>tensively with<strong>in</strong> what they have labeled “projects.” Among its various features, Oracc supports
multil<strong>in</strong>gual translation support, enables projects to be turned <strong>in</strong>to Word files, PDFs, or books us<strong>in</strong>g
the “ISO OpenDocument” standard; and allows data to be exported <strong>in</strong> the TEI format. Any cuneiform
tablet transliterations that are created with<strong>in</strong> Oracc will also be automatically uploaded to the CDLI.
The Oracc Project recognizes six major roles 93 and has developed specific documentation for each: (1)
user (a scholar us<strong>in</strong>g the Oracc corpora); (2) builder (someone work<strong>in</strong>g on texts to help build up Oracc,
e.g., lemmatiz<strong>in</strong>g or data entry); (3) manager (someone manag<strong>in</strong>g or adm<strong>in</strong>ister<strong>in</strong>g an Oracc project);
(4) developer (someone contribut<strong>in</strong>g code to the Oracc project); (5) system adm<strong>in</strong>istrator; and (6) and
steerer (senior Oracc users). Significant documentation is freely available for all but the last two roles.
Oracc is a grow<strong>in</strong>g project, and researchers are <strong>in</strong>vited to contribute texts to it through either a
donation or curation model. Through the donation model, text editions and any additional <strong>in</strong>formation
are simply sent to Oracc, and the project team <strong>in</strong>stalls, converts, and ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>s them (Oracc reserves
the right to perform m<strong>in</strong>or edit<strong>in</strong>g but promises to provide proper identification and credit for all data
as well as to identify all revisers of data). Through the curation model, the Oracc team helps users to
set up their cuneiform texts as a separate project on the Oracc server, and the curator is then
responsible for lemmatiz<strong>in</strong>g and ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g their texts (this model also gives the user greater control
over subsequent edits to materials). 94 Various web services assist those that are contribut<strong>in</strong>g corpora to
Oracc.
Oracc is an excellent example of a project that supports reuse of its data through the use of CC
licenses, commonly adopted technical standards, and extensive documentation as to how the data are
86 http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/<strong>in</strong>dex.html
87 The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary project (http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/<strong>in</strong>dex.html) is based at the Babylonian Section of the University of
Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. In addition to their work with Oracc and the CDLI, they have collaborated with the Electronic
Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETSCL).
88 For the full list, see http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/project-list.html.
89 http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sargon
90 http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dccmt/
91 http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/gkab
92 Creative Commons is a “nonprofit corporation dedicated to mak<strong>in</strong>g it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the
rules of copyright” (http://creativecommons.org/about/) and provides free licenses and legal tools that can be used by creators of <strong>in</strong>tellectual works that
wish to provide various levels of reuse of their work, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g attribution-only, share-alike, noncommercial, and no-derivative works.
93 http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/
94 For technical details on the curation model, see http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/contribut<strong>in</strong>g.html#curation; for their extensive corpus-builder
documentation, see http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/contribut<strong>in</strong>g.html#curation), and for the guide to project management, see
http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/manager/