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=> Digital Hammurabi

Digital Hammurabi
Posted by Jeff (Guest) jeff@attoz.com - Tuesday, April 13 2004, 23:53:11 (EDT)
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Digital Hammurabi is a major, cross-discipline effort originating at Johns Hopkins University aimed both at making very high resolution, three dimensional models of cuneiform tablets available to every researcher's computer and at producing an international standard Unicode encoding for cuneiform text.

When successfully completed, the project will enable scholars to select tablets from cuneiform digital libraries for use on their local computers where they can manipulate them at will, linking graphic cuneiform to encoded cuneiform. Scholars will be able to pan, tilt, rotate, magnify, and re-light these virtual tablets. They can produce "unwrapped" two dimensional projections of 3D tablets for print. They can generate accurate 3D plastic models of tablets. They can apply sophisticated and powerful text and corpora processing software toward concordance generation, morphological analysis, proximity and contextual searching, and automatic generation of critical apparatuses. Automated 3D character recognition will become a reality.

The Digital Hammurabi Project has just been awarded $1.55 million over the next three years by the U.S. National Science Foundation - a good start toward achieving our goals.

Specifically, we plan to:

1) produce a portable, non-contact, user-friendly, very high resolution 3D surface scanner that can scan all facets of an average cuneiform tablet in under a minute while implementing scantime adaptive resolution down to 10 micrometers (i.e., 100 lines per millimeter - at least 4 times finer than currently available resolutions) [Although there will always be a need to personally inspect tablets for the more difficult readings, we expect high quality 3D renderings of cuneiform tablets will be adequate for tablet autopsy in approximatley 95% of the cases encountered.]

2) develop new computer algorthims to stitch gigabytes of raw data together into coherent, virtual tablets for real-time, multi-resolution rendering, self-shading, and manipulation by researchers over fast Internet2 connections using software of our own design

3) coordinate a formal proposal to the Unicode Consortium for a standard Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform computer encoding (continuing ICE, the Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding) The encoding proposal is intended to include characters from Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Hittite, Elamite, and Hurrian, but not Old Persian or Ugaritic.

4) collaborate in the development of new international standards for 3D data aimed at data longevity and data integrity

5) collaborate in the development of new international standards for cuneiform text markup (XML metadata), aimed at feature comprehensiveness, data longevity, and data integrity

6) establish a leading petabyte-scale digital library archive of virtual 3D cuneiform tablets targeted for rapid, real-time Internet2 dissemination

7) invent a completely new technology - automated 3D character recognition of cuneiform writing.

Though the full realization of these goals will take several years, our thrust during the three years of the initial NSF grant is to develop a working high resolution scanner, computer algorithms for multi-resolution rendering and self-shadowing of 3D tablets, and the beginnings of a digital library infrastructure to support an accumulating archive.

We are applying the very latest computer technologies to these oldest of written documents in the hopes of making them more widely available to scholars and more accessible to better tools for philological research. We fully expect the new hardware and software technologies we develop to revolutionize cuneiform studies, not only by enabling plain text cuneiform transmission and analysis and by providing for ubiquitous 3D access to the world's tablet collections, but also by limiting physical contact with these valuable and unique ancient artifacts, while at the same time preserving our heritage through redundant archival copies of the originals, thereby ensuring their preservation into the future.

The success of the 3D portion of the project hinges on advances in hardware and software technology, which will generate several doctoral dissertations, research papers, and international workshops. The technological fallout is expected to enrich other disciplines as well.

The success of the encoding portion of the project depends upon the active involvement of a broad spectrum of cuneiform scholars (specialists in the various languages, genres, and areas), Unicode experts, font architects, and software engineers. We expect to have the second international ICE conference in the Spring of 2003.

The Digital Hammurabi team is actively seeking open collaboration with scholars and curators everywhere in every phase of our project. As we develop new hardware and software solutions we plan to make them broadly available.



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