Presenting on behalf of the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), PIs Karen Radner and Jamie Novotny by Jamie Novotny on August 26, 16.40-17.00 in session 1: Creating and enriching text data.
ABSTRACT: “Recent Work on State Archives of Assyria online: Making the Invisible Visible”
This presentation will summarize some recent work on the Oracc-hosted and LMU-Munich-based State Archives of Assyria Online (SAAo) project, especially the customization of the metadata pane of Oracc’s ‘Item View,’ which now presents significantly more information about the 5056 richly-annotated, Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian texts accessible on this Open-access web resource.
In 2005, at a time when many of the SAA volumes were out of print or difficult to get hold of, longtime Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project (NATCP) member Karen Radner (then UCL, now LMU Munich) sought out ways of making NATCP's rich and varied heritage data accessible to a wider audience. In collaboration with Eleanor Robson (then University of Cambridge, now UCL) and Steve Tinney (University of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), this led to the creation of State Archives of Assyria online (SAAo), with the first parts of the dataset available from 2007 and 2009 via the open-access web resources Knowledge and Power and Assyrian Empire Builders. Since August 2015, SAAo has been part of the LMU-Munich-based Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI; directed by Karen Radner and Jamie Novotny). Over the past fifteen years SAAo has strove to widely disseminate, facilitate, and promote the active use of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian texts published in the SAA series in academia and beyond. As part of this ongoing endeavor, the SAAo team has recently begun making its behind-the-scenes catalogue data visible to its users; this is in part to make information about the dating and authorship of texts (especially letters) more transparent and easier to under to understand, especially for non-specialists. The presentation will give an overview of how users can access SAAo’s metadata, as well as some customised features of Oracc.
For further information, visit the SAAo home page, about the project page, SAAo downloads page, and the SAA 17 Metadata View.