The Digital Hammurabi project of The Johns Hopkins University is happy to announce that we have just been awarded more than $1.5 million by the National Science Foundation of the U.S. government to begin, over the next 3 years, the development of hardware, software, and digital library infrastructure for the capture, archiving, and transmission over the Internet of very high resolution 3 dimensional virtual cuneiform tablets. When completed, cuneiform scholars will be able to collate tablets at their desks on their own computers using very high resolution digital 3D images of tablets scanned from museum collections around the world.
Digital Hammurabi is a joint project of several Hopkins institutions - the Near Eastern Studies Department, the Applied Physics Laboratory, the Computer Science Department, and the Center for Scholarly Resources of the University Libraries. Specific, long-term goals of the project include: � production of a portable, very high resolution 3D surface scanner that can scan all facets of a cuneiform tablet in under a minute at 10 micrometer resolution (at least 4 times finer than current resolutions) � development of cross-platform software to stitch gigabytes of raw data together into coherent, virtual tablets for optimal real-time rendering and manipulation over the Internet via new multi-resolution algorithms, shape-on-shape imaging, and shadow generation � establishment of a leading international digital library with a petabyte scale archive of virtual 3D cuneiform tablets processed for rapid Internet2 delivery � development of an international standard computer encoding for Sumero- Akkadian cuneiform, in continuing collaboration with cuneiformists and Unicode experts (Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding - <http://www.jhu.edu/ ice/>) � invention of a completely new technology - automated 3D character recognition of cuneiform writing We would like to thank those cuneiformists and Unicode experts who have given early and timely support and encouragement to the Digital Hammurabi and Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding projects. We are excited, and eager, to cooperate with the entire international community of cuneiform scholars and Unicode experts in the development and deployment of these ground breaking technologies that will revolutionize cuneiform studies. We are scheduled to present at the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Leiden this July, and will look forward to meeting with you there. And finally, we will soon announce the availability of our website for more detailed information. Jerry Cooper, Professor of Near Eastern Studies Dean A. Snyder, Senior Information Technology Specialist
