The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative to participate in Google Summer of Code 2022

On March 7 2022, Wolfson Fellows Émilie Pagé-Perron and Jacob L. Dahl were honoured to learn that the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI https://cdli.ucla.edu/)'s participation in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/) was renewed for the fifth time in a row.

GSoC is a global program focused on bringing more developers into open-source software development. Participants from all over the world work with an open-source organisation on a 10 to 22 week programming project during the summer and receive a stipend from Google for their work.

Émilie Pagé-Perron (Junior Research Fellow) and Jacob Dahl (Professor of Assyriology) direct The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) together with Bertrand Lafont (CNRS Paris) and Jürgen Renn (MPG Berlin). The initiative represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science and is driven by the mission to enable collection, preservation and accessibility of information—image files, textual annotation, and metadata—concerning all ancient Near Eastern artifacts inscribed with cuneiform, dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. In this mission, the CDLI is opening pathways to the rich historical tradition of the ancient Middle East.

GSoC participants tackle programming challenges covering a wide array of topics, from front-end design usability improvements to state-of-the-art machine translation for the Sumerian language. To see past projects, visit https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/archive and the participants’ blogs at https://cdli-gh.github.io/blog/.