Presenting on behalf of the Electronic Babylonian Literature, PI Enrique Jiménez by Aino Hätinen on August 26, 17.55-18.15 in session 1: Creating and enriching text data.
This presentation will give an overview of the accomplishments made in the first two years of the project “Electronic Babylonian Literature”, housed at LMU Munich and funded by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The goal of the project is to propel the reconstruction of Babylonian literature by means of tool that allow the identification of the thousands of fragments of cuneiform tablets that sleep unidentified in the drawers of museums around the world. Our focus has been on creating a website (https://ebabylon.org) that contains the “Fragmentarium” and a corpus with new editions of key pieces of Babylonian literature. The “Fragmentarium” is a searchable and lemmatized database of literary cuneiform fragments from the 1st millennium BCE; mostly pieces that are nowadays kept in the Kuyunjik, Babylon, and Sippar collections of the British Museum. In the first two years, we have transliterated over 16,000 fragments, identifying thousands of new pieces of Babylonian literature and scholarship and discovering almost 500 joins. Together with the new editions of the selected literary texts, this massive corpus facilitates the ultimate goal of the project: the development of an algorithm to identify fragments within this digital corpus on the basis of the transliterations.
for further details on technical issues - contact software developer: Jussi Laasonen (jussi.laasonen@lmu.de)