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

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created, stored, and ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>ed. By recogniz<strong>in</strong>g different roles of users and design<strong>in</strong>g specific
documentation for them, Oracc also illustrates the very different skills and needs of its potential users.
F<strong>in</strong>ally, through encourag<strong>in</strong>g two contribution models (both of which encourage shar<strong>in</strong>g and provide
attribution), the Oracc Project has recognized that there may be many scholars who wish to share their
data but either do not want to ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong> it <strong>in</strong> the long term or lack the technical skill to do so.
While both CDLI and Oracc illustrate that while there are many digital cuneiform projects under way
and thousands of digitized cuneiform tablets with both transliterations and translations onl<strong>in</strong>e, the need
to digitize thousands of cuneiform tablets and to provide long-term access to them is an ongo<strong>in</strong>g
challenge. The importance of consider<strong>in</strong>g 3-D scann<strong>in</strong>g as a means of preserv<strong>in</strong>g cuneiform tablets has
also been discussed by Kumar et al. (2003). The authors observed that cuneiform documents typically
exhibit three-dimensional writ<strong>in</strong>g on three-dimensional surfaces, so the Digital Hammurabi 95 Project
described <strong>in</strong> this article sought to create high-resolution 3-D models of tablets not only to preserve
them but also to provide better access to scholars. Typically, cuneiformists have had two ma<strong>in</strong>
techniques for represent<strong>in</strong>g and archiv<strong>in</strong>g cuneiform documents, “2D photography and hand-drawn
copies, or autographs.” Many such autographs can be found <strong>in</strong> collections such as the CDLI. These
autographs, however, have several disadvantages as outl<strong>in</strong>ed by Kumar et al., <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the fact that
they represent one author’s <strong>in</strong>terpretation of the signs on a tablet, cannot be used for collation, and are
not very useful for palaeography. The authors thus conclude that:
It is no wonder then that we are also see<strong>in</strong>g a number of recent forays <strong>in</strong>to 3D surface scann<strong>in</strong>g
of cuneiform tablets, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g by our Digital Hammurabi project. … Accurate, detailed, and
efficient 3D visualization will enable the virtual “autopsy” of cuneiform tablets and will
revolutionize cuneiform studies, not only by mak<strong>in</strong>g the world’s tablet collections broadly
available, but also by limit<strong>in</strong>g physical contact with these valuable and unique ancient artifacts,
while at the same time provid<strong>in</strong>g redundant archival copies of the orig<strong>in</strong>als (Kumar et al. 2003).
The Digital Hammurabi Project was founded <strong>in</strong> 1999 and is based at Johns Hopk<strong>in</strong>s University.
Accord<strong>in</strong>g to its website, this project has “pioneered basic research on digitiz<strong>in</strong>g ancient cuneiform
tablets.” Their research has focused on solv<strong>in</strong>g three technological problems: (1) creat<strong>in</strong>g a standard
computer encod<strong>in</strong>g for cuneiform text; (2) creat<strong>in</strong>g comprehensive cuneiform collections; and (3)
develop<strong>in</strong>g solutions for 3-D scann<strong>in</strong>g and visualization of the tablets. As of this writ<strong>in</strong>g, the project
has successfully <strong>in</strong>vented a “3D surface scanner that scans cuneiform tablets at 4 times the resolution
of any comparable technology,” 96 developed algorithms designed for “cuneiform tablet reconstruction
and 3D visualization,” and has successfully overseen a Unicode adoption of “the first <strong>in</strong>ternational
standard for the representation of cuneiform text on computers” (Cohen et al. 2004).
Cohen et al. (2004) have described some of these algorithms, the development of the encod<strong>in</strong>g
standard for cuneiform by the “Initiative for Cuneiform Encod<strong>in</strong>g”(ICE), 97 and iClay, 98 “a crossplatform,
Internet-deployable, Java applet that allows for the view<strong>in</strong>g and manipulation of 2D+ images
of cuneiform tablets.” At the time ICE was formed, there was no standard computer encod<strong>in</strong>g for
cuneiform text and Sumerologists had to create Lat<strong>in</strong> transliterations for cuneiform texts. To support
“automated cuneiform text process<strong>in</strong>g,” Cohen et al. stated that a “simple context-free description of
the text provided by a native cuneiform computer encod<strong>in</strong>g” was needed. Consequently, ICE
95 http://www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/<strong>in</strong>dex.html
96 For more on this scanner, see Hahn et al. (2006)
97 http://www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/ice/ice.html
98 http://www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/iclay/iclayalert.html