On this page we explain the various ways of participating in project-building with Oracc and what it means to contribute texts following either of our two models: donation and curation.
Under the donation model, you simply send us your text editions — which may include additional information like translations, prosopographies, etc. — and we take care of installing them on Oracc and maintaining them. We may ask you to review the results of our conversion processes to ensure that the material that goes online is representative of your work, but after that we may edit it as necessary to interoperate smoothly with other Oracc corpora. Note that it is not our policy to introduce arbitrary or unnecessary edits (quite apart from anything else we have many other things to do), but we may make changes following collation or further research in the field.
We will identify you as the source of the data, and indicate the identity of subsequent revisers of the data as necessary.
Under the curation model, we will help you set up your texts as a separate project or subproject on the Oracc server. We will look to you to lemmatize and maintain the texts, and to develop appropriate educational 'portal' material about them. You will retain greater control over subsequent edits.
Because the Oracc software is well-suited to the development of corpora, and because a corpus or a portal can be transformed into a book, we hope that people will find it advantageous to begin projects under the curation model even if they later feel that it is better ultimately to donate their texts, perhaps after the publication of the book, or when their research interests shift.
We welcome inquiries about planning new projects at any time. You do not need specialist computer skills to run an Oracc project. We can assist with all aspects of the process, from grant-writing onwards. In fact the earlier you consult us, the more we can help. Please email us at to tell us more about your interests and needs.
Our policy is that all material in Oracc is available for re-use under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. That means, in practice, that anybody can download texts, change them and publish them again as long as the source is mentioned and the new work is released under the same (or similar) license.
As the size of the Oracc user base grows, there is an increasing likelihood that something like that will indeed happen. For example, someone who is working on a project about some aspect of Mesopotamian culture may need to prepare editions of texts which have special-purpose annotation and then may well use your text, or another project's version of it, as her point of departure. For us, this ability to build on the work of others — always crediting them for their contributions — is a key reason for the implementation of the Oracc system and a major factor in our willingness to invest large amounts of time in the project.
To read more introductory information about Oracc you can go to the How and Why page. If you have further questions or would like to donate or curate texts, you can e-mail us at .
18 Dec 2019Steve Tinney & Eleanor Robson
Steve Tinney & Eleanor Robson, 'Contributing to Oracc', Oracc: The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, Oracc, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/about/contributing/]
Released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0, 2014.
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