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2021 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation only (Other academic)
Abstract [en]
Standardizing, integrating, and linking metadata collections for digital text catalogues will be among the most pressing tasks facing students of cuneiform texts in coming decades. Digital research environments now extend into virtually every aspect of scholarly workflows, encompassing not only the rendition of inscriptions in a digital form, but also a wide range of metadata entities spanning artefactual, linguistic, spatial, temporal, and bibliographical aspects of cuneiform texts in their historical, archaeological, and museal setting. Not only the inscriptions, but also considerable parts of our knowledge about them, are rapidly being transformed into digital and extraordinarily dynamic resources. Furthering the integration and interoperability of such resources will be a key prerequisite for unleashing the full potential of the cuneiform corpus – certainly one of the largest bodies of historical documentation ever known – for future research and learning. Within this sprawling digital landscape, efforts at interconnecting data collections are faced with a vast undergrowth of discrete projects, registers, and collections with only limited reference to centralized, controlled indices and vocabularies for the definition of basic metadata entities. Introducing Geomapping Landscapes of Writing (GLoW), a three-year research project with the Uppsala University Department of Linguistics and Philology and funded by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, this paper reviews a program of surveying, querying, and curating metadata collections for cuneiform studies. In so doing, we point to principal lacunae in the overall coverage of current digital catalogues, potential for linking repositories, and suggestions for best practice in the generation and preservation of metadata collections in the field.
Keywords
Metadata, Cuneiform, Middle East
National Category
History and Archaeology
Research subject
Assyriology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-461106 (URN)
Conference
American Society of Overseas Research Annual Meeting 2021, Virtual, 9-12 December 2021
2021-12-122021-12-122023-11-23