Oracc is the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus. It provides open-access, standards-based publication platforms, research tools and teaching resources for Assyriology and ancient Near Eastern History, hosting around 40 academic research projects worldwide.
Oracc has become established as one of the core online resources in the world of ancient Near Eastern studies. It originated in an AHRC-funded research project Prof. Eleanor Robson ran at the University of Cambridge several years ago and is now continuing to run from University College London in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia).
Nisaba is the new text editor that enables Oracc content creators to view, edit and validate documents recording the content of cunneiform tablets from various ancient Mesopotamian cultures, translated and formatted for the modern reader. These documents are text files in the ASCII Transliteration Format (ATF), originally developed for the Oracc project. Nisaba is being developed as an extenstion to Visual Studio Code, a text editor developed by Microsoft.
Nisaba's precursor is Nammu which was developed as a cross-platform stand-alone tool, and has now reached the end of its active development life. It will remain accessible but with very limited maintenance. Nisaba is now the official tool for ATF edition.
Nisaba has been funded by Oracc and Nahrein, and as such aims to cover the needs of both initiatives, including making ATF edition more user friendly for Arabic- and Farsi-speaking content creators.
Oracc content creators originally used an Emacs plugin for edition, validation and lemmatisation of ATF files. This plugin can only be installed as part of Emacs, which can have a steep learning curve.
With Nisaba, as well as with Nammu in the past, we intend to make a user friendly tool that would replace the use of the Oracc Emacs plugin. This will help lower the access barriers to the use of Oracc, enabling more projects to adopt it.
Nisaba is currently being developed by the UCL Research Software Development Group.
