# The Cuneiform Project

A public-interest research initiative to help open the historical record
preserved in cuneiform tablets.

## The mission

Bring machine learning and scholarship together to help read tablets at scale,
connect their records, and study how people worked, traded, and lived.
Administrative records, letters, and other texts can provide evidence about
commodities, quantities, dates, people, and places.

## The approach

1. Find possible signs in photographs and preserve their image coordinates.
2. Present ranked visual alternatives for scholarly inspection.
3. Improve basic translation alongside reading order and transliteration, retaining uncertainty.
4. Extract research data with references back to the source evidence.

Current capabilities include sign detection, recognition, and basic translation.
The website demonstration focuses on sign recognition and scholarly inspection.

## Ways to contribute

Scholars and collections can help evaluate proposed readings, shape the review
workflow, and connect the project with images and editions.

Engineers and researchers can advance detection, recognition, evaluation, and
interfaces that preserve source evidence.

Partners and supporters can help resource annotation, researcher time, and computing.
A public contact channel has not yet been announced.

## Status

Early research initiative. This brief does not assert registered charitable status,
tax-deductibility, institutional partnerships, or a public funding program.