Still GLoWing: Developing Synergies in the Assembly and Development of Sustainable Open Access Data in Cuneiform Studies

Description

Abstract (En)

From 2020 to 2023, Geomapping Landscapes of Writing (GLoW), a research project hosted by Uppsala University Department of Linguistics and Philology, fielded an innovative research programme for large-scale data assembly and research on the materiality of writing in the cuneiform world. This poster presents an overview of this programme, exemplifying the potential of data integration and best practice approaches for how small and medium research projects may engage with and contribute to open research data repositories, building synergies and furthering the sustainability of research data in a digital, open access environment.

Through a broad survey of the full cuneiform corpus, covering 400,000 inscribed artifacts, encountered everywhere from Rome to Kabul, and spanning a period of some three millennia of early human history, GLoW has delivered several standalone indices for reuse in research and teaching, and built a tailored dataset along the lines of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) data model. This has allowed direct publishing of project data to an established online research platform seeing 20-30,000 visits per month on average. Furthermore, GLoW has helped updating and expanding the CDLI data model, including especially archaeological and collection data for the entire corpus and support of the building of a publications data crowdsourcing feature now supporting a bibliography of 20,000 references linked to the CDLI artifacts catalogue and metadata tables.

In negotiating the many institutional and financial challenges facing small and medium-scale research projects in the humanities today, an understanding and willingness to engage with and reuse knowledge nested within open research communities can work wonders. GLoW offers a number of important lessons on how high impact can be achieved at low cost, and how sustaining research data for the future can be helped by augmenting and strengthening existing platforms for open research, ultimately to the benefit of all parties involved.