Access to Cuneiform Texts (CDLI-ACT)
An Arabic-language interface and vocabularies for the CDLI, built with partners in Iraq and launched through workshops in Oxford and Iraq.
- Role: Co-Principal Investigator, with Rune Rattenborg (Lund University), Haider ʿAqīl ʿAbid and Jaafar Jotheri (Al-Qadisiyah University)
- Funding: British Institute for the Study of Iraq, Wolfson College General Fund for Assyriology, Meditor Trust; £17,340, 2025–2026
- Team: Zainab Mizyidawi, Zahra Dabaghmanesh, Lars Willighagen, Malath Feadha
CDLI-ACT adds an Arabic interface and Arabic vocabularies to the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, so that scholars, students and the public in the Arab world can search, download, edit and cite a catalogue of some 400,000 cuneiform artefacts. Most of these objects come from Iraq and its neighbours but are held in museums abroad, and almost all tools for studying them are in European languages.
Workshops in Oxford and at the universities of Al-Qadisiyah, Babil, Baghdad and Mosul translated the catalogue vocabularies and launched the test interface with Arabic-speaking users. The vocabularies also feed international resources such as the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus.