Astronomische Tagebücher Digital

The present project intends to produce a digital edition of the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries, which will then constitute the basis for computer-assisted analyses of hitherto neglected aspects pertaining to the internal structure of the corpus. The central themes of this research will be the diachronic developments traceable in the corpus as well as the relationship between tablet content and text layout. The project sets out to explore traits such as content variation, orthography, syntactical and lexical features in a systematic manner, thereby introducing an approach that focuses on evolutions and heterogeneities into the study of a corpus that in spite of its longevity was perceived as fairly homogeneous by previous research. Considering the sheer size of the corpus, which consists of more than 1,000 tablets and fragments, it is uniquely suited for a pioneering effort to test the application of methods from the field of Digital Humanities to a cuneiform corpus.
The Akkadian text of the Astronomical Diaries will be converted into a format following the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The phenomena to be analyzed will be annotated by means of a TEI-based encoding scheme and subsequently exported into a XML-based database. In a final step, the data gathered will be evaluated by mean of customized web applications. Thus, for the first time a comprehensive treatment of key aspects of this important texts corpus will be achieved. The interpretation of the results will allow conclusions on the internal structure of the corpus and enable us to attempt a redaction history of the corpus. By pursuing the question of how the Babylonian astronomers selected and put into writing their data, this project will also elucidate epistemic practices of scientists in antiquity.
The content-related work for the project will be carried out by the applicant, whose scientific background lies in the field of Assyriology. Technical support at the stage of encoding will be provided by a post-doctoral IT-specialist with a background in Digital Humanities, who will also be responsible for the development and application of the analytical tools in collaboration with the applicant.