Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) is a technique developed by neuroscientists for comparing activity patterns of different measurement modalities (e.g., fMRI, electrophysiology, behavior). As a framework, RSA has several advantages over existing approaches to interpretation of language encoders based on probing or diagnostic classification: namely, it does not require large training samples, is not prone to overfitting, and it enables a more transparent comparison between the representational geometries of different models and modalities. We demonstrate the utility of RSA by establishing a previously unknown correspondence between widely-employed pre-trained language encoders and human processing difficulty via eye-tracking data, showcasing its potential in the interpretability toolbox for neural models.

Recent studies have shown that language models pretrained and/or fine-tuned on randomly permuted sentences exhibit competitive performance on GLUE, putting into question the importance of word order information. Somewhat counter-intuitively, some of these studies also report that position embeddings appear to be crucial for models' good performance with shuffled text. We probe these language models for word order information and investigate what position embeddings learned from shuffled text encode, showing that these models retain information pertaining to the original, naturalistic word order. We show this is in part due to a subtlety in how shuffling is implemented in previous work - before rather than after subword segmentation. Surprisingly, we find even Language models trained on text shuffled after subword segmentation retain some semblance of information about word order because of the statistical dependencies between sentence length and unigram probabilities. Finally, we show that beyond GLUE, a variety of language understanding tasks do require word order information, often to an extent that cannot be learned through fine-tuning.

I mitten av 2017 uppstod en diplomatisk kris mellan Qatar och fyra grannländer, nämligen Saudiarabien, Förenade Arabemiraten, Bahrain och Egypten. Som följd av krisen avbröt dessa länder sina diplomatiska förbindelser med Qatar.Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka innehållet i nyhetsartiklar om den inträffade diplomatiska krisen från både Al-Jazeera och Al-Arabiya samt att försöka kartlägga hur rapporteringen skilde sig åt. De primära frågeställningarna i denna undersökning kommer att behandla vilka normer de två tv-kanalerna har använt sig av för att producera sina respektive nyhetsstoff samt vilka tillvägagångssätt som har tillämpats för att publicera eller rapportera till respektive publik. Vidare kommer undersökningen att försöka kartlägga, analysera och skildra andra aspekter av värde såsom objektivitetsnivån, hur finansieringen påverkade de två nyhetskanalernas nyhetskvalitet samt deras spridning. Undersökningen kommer att granska om nyhetsartiklarna i båda kanalerna har gett en nyanserad bild eller bara rapporterat en sida av händelsen. Samtliga frågeställningar har sammanfattats i två huvudpunkter. Den första punkten syftar till att klargöra vilka språkliga skillnader som förekommer i rapporteringen om Qatarkrisen i de två satellit-tv-kanalerna Al-Jazeeras och Al-Arabiyas nyhetsartiklar. Den andra punkten avser att undersöka om Al-Jazeera och Al-Arabiya har varit neutrala eller påverkade av sina respektive regeringars politiska inställning i rapporteringen om Qatarkrisen.Jag har analyserat fem artiklar från varje kanal för att se vilken information som förmedlas. Som jag kommer att förtydliga, finns det tydliga tendenser som visar att rapporteringen av vissa händelseförlopp i Qatarkrisen skiljer sig avsevärt åt, vilket eskalerade krisen. Utifrån innehållsanalys och temaanalys med kodning presenterar jag en jämförelse av hur språket och ordvalet skiljer sig i nyhetsrapporteringen. Både innehållsanalys och tematisk analys har samma mål, nämligen att analysera material genom att dela upp texten i små innehållsenheter och sedan analysera texterna (Vaismoradi et al, 2013, ss. 400–402). Resultatet av denna jämförelse visar tydliga skillnader i ordval och parafraser av samma nyheter mellan de båda kanalerna. Till exempel rapporterade Al-Jazeera i den första nyheten att Qatars nyhetsbyrå hade hackats och att falska uttalanden av emiren hade publicerats. Al-Arabiya undvek dock att nämna att nyhetsbyrån hade hackats och rapporterade istället att alla uttalanden av emiren var falska.Denna studie baseras på tidigare forskning av forskarna Leon Brakho och Kristina Riegert, som har skrivit flera böcker om arabiska massmedier. Dessutom har jag använt tre olika teorier för att besvara frågeställningarna, nämligen normativ teori, auktoritär teori och gestaltningsteori.Denna studie baseras på tidigare forskning av forskarna Leon Brakho och Kristina Riegert, som har skrivit flera böcker om arabiska massmedier. Dessutom har jag använt tre olika teorier för att besvara frågeställningarna, nämligen normativ teori, auktoritär teori och gestaltningsteori.Genom jämförelsen mellan nyhetsartiklarna åskådliggörs att kanalerna har använt olika termer och ord om samma händelse. Samtidigt förekommer mer motstridig terminologi i rapporteringen mellan de båda nyhetskanalerna. Det var anmärkningsvärt att se hur uppbyggnaden av varje nyhetsartikel, samt hur varje kanal skildrar eller rapporterar om en viss händelse, skilde sig åt.

This is a comprehensive study on modality in one of the largest Turkic languages, Kazakh, as it is spoken in China. Kazakh is the official language of the Republic of Kazakhstan and is furthermore spoken by about one and a half million people in China in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and in Aksai Kazakh Autonomous County in Gansu Province.The method employed is empirical, i.e. data-oriented. The modal expressions in Kazakh are analyzed in a theoretical framework essentially based on the works of Lars Johanson. The framework defines semantic notions of modality from a functional and typological perspective. The modal volition, deontic evaluation, and epistemic evaluation express attitudes towards the propositional content and are conveyed in Kazakh by grammaticalized moods, particles and lexical devices. All these categories are treated in detail, and ample examples of their different usages are provided with interlinear annotation. The Kazakh expressions are compared with corresponding ones used in other Turkic languages. Contact influences of Uyghur and Chinese are also dealt with.The data used in this study include texts recorded by the author in 20102012, mostly in the northern regions of Xinjiang, as well as written texts published in Kazakhstan and China. The written texts represent different genres: fiction, non-fiction, poetry and texts published on the Internet. Moreover, examples have been elicited from native speakers of Kazakh and Uyghur. The Appendix contains nine texts recorded by the author in the Kazakh-speaking regions of Xinjiang, China. These texts illustrate the use of many of the items treated in the study.

This is a comprehensive study on expressions of modality in one of the largest Turkic languages, Kazakh, as it is spoken in China. Kazakh is the official language of the Republic of Kazakhstan and is furthermore spoken by about one and a half million people in China in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and in Aksai Kazakh Autonomous County in Gansu Province.The method employed is empirical, i.e. data-oriented. The modal expressions in Kazakh are analyzed in a theoretical framework essentially based on the works of Lars Johanson. The framework defines semantic notions of modality from a functional and typological perspective. The modal volition, deontic evaluation, and epistemic evaluation express attitudes towards the propositional content and are conveyed in Kazakh by grammaticalized moods, particles and lexical devices. All these categories are treated in detail, and ample examples of their different usages are provided with interlinear annotation. The Kazakh expressions are compared with corresponding ones used in other Turkic languages. Contact influences of Uyghur and Chinese are also dealt with.The data used in this study include texts recorded by the author in 20102012, mostly in the northern regions of Xinjiang, as well as written texts published in Kazakhstan and China. The written texts represent different genres: fiction, non-fiction, poetry and texts published on the Internet. Moreover, examples have been elicited from native speakers of Kazakh and Uyghur.

The Appendix contains nine texts recorded by the author in the Kazakh-speaking regions of Xinjiang, China. These texts illustrate the use of many of the items treated in the study.

In this thesis, we investigate dependency parsing for commercial application, namely for future integration in a dialogue system. To do this, we conduct several experiments on dialogue data to assess parser performance on this domain, and to improve this performance over a baseline. This work makes the following contributions: first, the creation and manual annotation of a gold-standard data set for dialogue data; second, a thorough error analysis of the data set, comparing neural network parsing to traditional parsing methods on this domain; and finally, various domain adaptation experiments show how parsing on this data set can be improved over a baseline.  We further show that dialogue data is characterized by questions in particular, and suggest a method for improving overall parsing on these constructions. 

This study investigates the usefulness of the Treebank of Learner English (TLE) when applied to the task of Native Language Identification (NLI). The TLE is effectively a parallel corpus of Standard/Learner English, as there are two versions; one based on original learner essays, and the other an error-corrected version. We use the corpus to explore how useful a parser trained on ungrammatical relations is compared to a parser trained on grammatical relations, when used as features for a native language classification task. While parsing results are much better when trained on grammatical relations, native language classification is slightly better using a parser trained on the original treebank containing ungrammatical relations.

Recent advances in the pre-training of language models leverage large-scale datasets to create multilingual models. However, low-resource languages are mostly left out in these datasets. This is primarily because many widely spoken languages are not well represented on the web and therefore excluded from the large-scale crawls used to create datasets. Furthermore, downstream users of these models are restricted to the selection of languages originally chosen for pre-training. This work investigates how to optimally leverage existing pre-trained models to create low-resource translation systems for 16 African languages. We focus on two questions: 1) How can pre-trained models be used for languages not included in the initial pre-training? and 2) How can the resulting translation models effectively transfer to new domains? To answer these questions, we create a new African news corpus covering 16 languages, of which eight languages are not part of any existing evaluation dataset. We demonstrate that the most effective strategy for transferring both to additional languages and to additional domains is to fine-tune large pre-trained models on small quantities of high-quality translation data.

When children encounter new subjects in school, they are also faced with new ways of using language. Learning science thus means learning the language of science, and writing is one of the ways this is accomplished. The present study investigates writing in natural sciences in grades 5 and 8 in Swedish schools. Major theoretical influences for these investigations are found within the socio-cultural, dialogical and social semiotic perspectives on language use.

The study is based on texts written by 97 students, interviews around these texts and observations from 16 different classroom practices. Writing is seen as a situated practice; therefore analysis is carried out of the activities surrounding the texts. The student texts are analysed in terms of genre and in relation to their abstraction, density and use of expansions. This analysis shows among other things that the texts show increasing abstraction and density with increasing age, whereas the text structure and the use of expansions do not increase.

It is also argued that a central point in school writing must be the students’ way of talking about their texts. Analysis of interviews with the students is thus carried out in terms of text movability. The results from this analysis indicate that students find it difficult to talk about their texts. They find it hard to express the main content of the text, as well as to discuss it’s function and potential readers.

Previous studies argue that writing constitutes a potential for learning. In the material studied in this thesis, this potential learning tool is not used to any large extent. To be able to participate in natural sciences in higher levels, students need to take part in practices where the specialized language of natural science is used in writing as well as in speech.

Åsa af Geijerstam diskuterar i sin artikel "Skrivande i NO-ämnet" elevers skrivande utifrån olika aspekter. Hon redovisar data från projektet Elevers möte med skolans textvärldar och tar sin utgångspunkt i bland annat kognitiva, konstruktivistiska och sociokulturella perspektiv. Vidare problematiserar af Geijerstam elevers skrivande i NO-ä,mnen utifrån frågor om anknytningar till textkulturer och utifrån frågor om dialogens betydelse i detta sammanhang.

This book is a critical edition of a versified history of Shah Abbas I attributed to Sayyid Aḥmad Ḥusaynī Khalīfah. It narrates the life of Shah Abbas I from before his ascension to the throne in 1588 until his death in 1629, and includes a brief history of his maternal ancestors, the Mīr-i Buzurg notables of Mazandaran. The majority of the work consists of accounts of Abbas I’s military campaigns and expeditions, and in these parts the poet narrates the history in the style of a heroic epic. This critical edition is based on MS. 4769 at the Malek National Library and Museum, which apparently is the sole extant copy of this work. We have therefore adopted an analogical-conjectural method of emendation in attempting to reconstruct the original text. Because no title appears in the manuscript, we have named it the “Futūḥāt-i Gītīsitān” (Conqueror of the World), an honorific title ascribed to Shah Abbas I. The name of the poet does not appear in the colophon. No direct reference to the name of the poet is found in the text, but he traces his lineage to the Mīrbuzurg House in Mazandaran and includes information about his family and the migration of his great grandfather, Sayyid Niẓām, to Isfahan during the reign of Shah Tahmasb.  

This study discusses the rise of mythological thinking, focusing on ancient Near Eastern creation myths and creation accounts in mythological works in particular, with additional material drawn from lists of gods and other sources. The similarities and differences between several creation myths are analyzed by means of a diachronic and comparative method, tracing the development of mythological thinking about creation over thousands of years. The study departs in the main from six ancient creation myths and accounts of creation from ancient Mesopotamia: three Sumerian compositions to form the vestiges of a Sumerian creation myth, and three Babylonian myths which contain accounts of creation. A comparison of similarities and differences between these compositions is performed. In a final section, a comparison is made with the Old Testament and the Quran’s creation account, where phrases from the latter two texts are compared to the earlier myths and accounts of creation to produce an understanding of which elements of creation in religions with modern day followers rest upon ancient Mesopotamian foundations.

One speech sound can be associated with multiple meanings through iconicity, indexicality, and/or systematicity. It was not until recently that this “pluripotentiality” of sound symbolism attracted serious attention, and it remains uninvestigated how pluripotentiality may arise. In the current study, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and English speakers rated unfamiliar jewel names on three semantic scales: size, brightness, and hardness. The results showed language-specific and cross-linguistically shared pluripotential sound symbolism. Japanese speakers associated voiced stops with large and dark jewels, whereas Mandarin speakers associated [i] with small and bright jewels. Japanese, Mandarin, and English speakers also associated lip rounding with darkness and softness. These sound-symbolic meanings are unlikely to be obtained through metaphorical or metonymical extension, nor are they reported to colexify. Notably, in a purely semantic network without the mediation of lip rounding, softness can instead be associated with brightness, as illustrated by synesthetic metaphors such as yawaraka-na hizashi /jawaɾakanaçizaɕi/ “a gentle (lit. soft) sunshine” in Japanese. These findings suggest that the semantic networks of sound symbolism may not coincide with those of metaphor or metonymy. The current study summarizes the findings in the form of (phono)semantic maps to facilitate cross-linguistic comparisons of pluripotential sound symbolism.

The abundance of natural languages and the complexities involved in describingtheir structures pose significant challenges for modern linguists, not only in documentation but also in the systematic organization of knowledge. Computational linguisticstools hold promise in comprehending the “big picture”, provided existing grammars aredigitized and made available for analysis using state-of-the-art language models. Extensive efforts have been made by an international team of linguists to compile such aknowledge base, resulting in the DReaM corpus – a comprehensive dataset comprisingtens of thousands of digital books containing multilingual language descriptions.However, there remains a lack of tools that facilitate understanding of concise language structures and uncovering overlooked topics and dialects. This thesis representsa small step towards elucidating the broader picture by utilizing a subset of the DReaMcorpus as a vector space capable of capturing genetic ties among described languages.To achieve this, we explore several encoding algorithms in conjunction with varioussegmentation strategies and vector summarization approaches for generating bothmonolingual and cross-lingual feature representations of selected grammars in Englishand Russian.Our newly proposed sentence-facets TF-IDF model shows promise in unsupervisedgeneration of monolingual representations, conveying sufficient signal to differentiate historical linguistic relations among 484 languages from 26 language familiesbased on their descriptions. However, the construction of a cross-lingual vector spacenecessitates further exploration of advanced technologies.

This paper presents work where a general-purpose text categorization method was applied to categorize medical free-texts. The purpose of the experiments was to examine how such a method performs without any domain-specific knowledge, hand-crafting or tuning. Additionally, we compare the results from the general-purpose method with results from runs in which a medical thesaurus as well as automatically extracted keywords were used when building the classifiers. We show that standard text categorization techniques using stemmed unigrams as the basis for learning can be applied directly to categorize medical reports, yielding an F-measure of 83.9, and outperforming the more sophisticated methods.

This paper infers the processes of development and change of grammatical gender in Indo-Aryan languages using phylogenetic comparative methods. 48 Indo-Aryan languages are coded based on 44 presence-absence features relating to gender marking on the verbs, adjectives, personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, and possessive pronouns. A Bayesian Reverse Jump Hyper Prior analysis, which infers the evolutionary dynamics of changes between feature values, gives results that are consistent with historical linguistic and typological studies on gender systems in Indo-Aryan languages and predicts the evolutionary trends of the features included in the dataset.

Languages of diverse structures and different families tend to share common patterns if they are spoken in geographic proximity. This convergence is often explained by horizontal diffusibility, which is typically ascribed to language contact. In such a scenario, speakers of two or more languages interact and influence each other's languages, and in this interaction, more grammaticalized features tend to be more resistant to diffusion compared to features of more lexical content. An alternative explanation is vertical heritability: languages in proximity often share genealogical descent. Here, we suggest that the geographic distribution of features globally can be explained by two major pathways, which are generally not distinguished within quantitative typological models: feature diffusion and language expansion. The first pathway corresponds to the contact scenario described above, while the second occurs when speakers of genetically related languages migrate. We take the worldwide distribution of nominal classification systems (grammatical gender, noun class, and classifier) as a case study to show that more grammaticalized systems, such as gender, and less grammaticalized systems, such as classifiers, are almost equally widespread, but the former spread more by language expansion historically, whereas the latter spread more by feature diffusion. Our results indicate that quantitative models measuring the areal diffusibility and stability of linguistic features are likely to be affected by language expansion that occurs by historical coincidence. We anticipate that our findings will support studies of language diversity in a more sophisticated way, with relevance to other parts of language, such as phonology.

In this paper I discuss the translation and commentary on the Song of Songs by the Karaite Japheth ben Eli (died ca 1005). The point of departure is the manuscript Uppsala O Nova 791, which was used by Paul Achilles Jung, the father of Carl Gustav Jung, as the basis for his dissertation in 1867 and later acquired by Uppsala University Library in 1982.

This study provides a critical edition of chapters nine and ten of Muḥīṭ al-tavārīkh (The Sea of Chronicles) by Muḥammad Amīn b. Mīrzā Muḥammad Zamān Bukhārī (Ṣūfīyānī). Muḥīṭ al-tavārīkh is a valuable source for the study of late seventeenth-century Central Asian history, historiography, and language. The present work represents the first critical edition of a primary source of Subḥān Qulī Khān’s reign. The ninth chapter (bāb) offers accounts of the Timurid kings, Abulkhayrid/Shaybanid and the first four Ashtarkhanid/Janid khans. The tenth chapter presents a detailed account of the life and times of “the last great” Ashtarkhanid/Janid khan, Subḥān Qulī Bahādur (1682–1702), revealing historical information essential for scholars of the period and region.

The Sea of Chronicles is an English translation of the ninth and tenth chapters of the historiographical work entitled Muḥīṭ al-tavārīkh by Muḥammad Amīn b. Mīrzā Muḥammad Zamān Bukhārī. The work is a valuable source in particular for the study of the late seventeenth-century Central Asian political, cultural and religious history.

The ninth chapter offers accounts of the Timurid, Abulkhayrid/Shaybanid and the first four Ashtarkhanid khans. The tenth chapter which is the most original and important chapter of the work presents a detailed account of the life and time of the last great Ashtarkhanid ruler, Subḥān Qulī Khān (r. 1682–1702), revealing historical information essential for the study of the period and region.

A Sargonic period cuneiform text containing a month name from the Old Semitic calendar attested e.g. at Abu Salabikh and Ebla is treated and commented on. An interpretation of the month name is proposed.

Publication of a messenger text in cuneiform writing from a private collection in Uppsala, Sweden. The text dates from the latter half of the Ur III period (c 2100-2000 BCE) and lists disbursements to a group of ten named and an unknown number of unlisted persons. The known modern history is described in brief.

Artikeln ger en överblick över personer härstammande från eller verksamma i Sverige vilka varit verksamma inom det främreorientaliska forskningsfältet, inom språkvetenskap, kulturvetenskap och religion samt arkeologi.

Thousands of Sumerian and Old Akkadian personal names from 3rd millennium BCE Meso-potamia are known and documented. The present study inspects names containing the royal appellatives, Sumerian lugal and Akkadian śarrum. The study aims at uncovering the rela-tionships between personal names and the development of early historical kingship and reli-gious thought in the area.

An overview of Sumerian and Old Akkadian names and name-giving serves as a starting point for semantic investigations of lugal- and śarrum-names. Sumerian and Old Akkadian names are to a large extent meaningful, and the literal meaning can be used to arrive at an understanding of the symbolic value, which led to the coining of the name. Discussions rely on comparable passages of contemporary and later written traditions.

To facilitate discussion and comparisons between the languages, names are divided into semantic groups based on characteristic traits found in contemporary royal inscriptions and religious texts. Parallel constructions are noted whenever such constructions are known. Names are assigned human or divine referents when possible. A look at political and religious developments puts the distribution of certain name types over time and space into perspective. Local and regional traditions and types are displayed and related either to royal ideological traits or to theological speculation. Besides locally significant gods, a few other deities can be identified as referents in names. A brief statistical overview of different archives shows that names featuring the figure of the lugal experience an increase in popularity at the expense of  other types.

A system of annotation gives approximate numbers for bearers of names belonging to the types investigated. Lists of attestations, which document date and archival context, form the basis for discussions and conclusions and make the material available for inspection and further exploration.

Analysis of a recently published year name from southern Mesopotamia dating to the Classic Sargonic period (ca 2240-2200 BCE). An overlooked parallel is presented. The syntax of year names written in syllabic Akkadian and with logographic Sumerian elements is discussed.

Review of an exhibition catalogue from the exhibit "Beyond Babylon" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, NY, Nov 15 2008-Mar 15 2009.

Review of a volume collecting papers presented at the conference "Who was king? Who was not king? The rulers and the ruled in the Ancient Near East", Prague, Apr 14-16, 2010.

Review of a monograph comprising a reworked doctoral dissertation. The volume under review attempts to present a synthesis of evidence of several decades of primarily French excavations in southern Iraq in the major centres of the Sumerian city-state of Lagaš; one of the historically best attested and most important Sumerian states.

Review of a monograph containing 337 texts, mainly from the Sargonic period, and written in Sumerian and Akkadian. The reviewed volume represents a cooperation between the Real Academia in Madrid and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Iraq, and offers treatments and depictions of cuneiform tablets originally belonging in various archival contexts in the urban centre of Adab or nearby localities, along with a discussion of the history of Assyriological research into this area.

Two Old Babylonian contracts from a Swedish private collection are published. The known modern history of the contracts is described. The texts are given a historical and geographical context in the Ancient Near East of the Old Babylonian period (ca 2000-1595 BCE). The type of text, the people appearing in them, some administrative procedures and the times in which the contracts were written are discussed.

The name of a Sumerian divinity known from Early Dynastic (ca 2600-2350 BCE) Sumerian incantations from Fara and Ebla is analyzed from an equivalency in an Eblaite (ca 2400 BCE) lexical list. The lexical evidence is compared to the deity's potential function in in the incantations.

Three early Mesopotamian cuneiform documents are studied and treated. One is a contract dealing with the acquisition of fields in the Early Dynastic Sumerian city of Šuruppag (ca 2600 BCE); one is a foundation document written on a clay cone commemorating the building of a temple by Gudea, governor of the city-state of Lagaš (ca 2120 BCE); one is a small administrative text from the eighth year of the reign of the Ur III king Šu-Su'en (ca 2030 BCE). The barley to copper equivalency found in some Early Dynastic Šuruppag contracts is discussed based on information in the first text.

Memorial article over Orientalist and Near Eastern philologist Åke Waldemar Sjöberg, 1924–2014. Born in Sala, Sweden, educated in Uppsala and Heidelberg, active as professor and researcher in Chicago and Philadelphia. Curator of the Tablet Collections of the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Editor of the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary.

Cuneiform writing ranks among the largest bodies of ancient historical documentation. No attempt has hitherto been made to fully geomap this corpus. Combining philology, archaeology, and comparative linguistics, GLoW assembles and analyses a full digital record of this corpus drawing on recent advances in digital humanities. As a first quantifiable, comprehensive study of the cuneiform corpus, GLoW provides a benchmark example of applying digital and spatial computing tools to the study of early writing. Engaging with artifacts marred by years of recent conflict, it also serves as a key reference document for protecting part of the common heritage of humankind.

Histories of the ancient world are founded on the assumption that historical documents are products of unique circumstances of production, deposition, and preservation, unlikely to be repeated and therefore particular in nature. The idiographic position of the written word as a source of knowledge about the past rests upon this notion of uniqueness and exclusivity, as opposed to the omnipresence and perceived vulgarity of material culture. Counting a conservative half million individual texts, the cuneiform corpus ranks among the largest discrete bodies of writing from the ancient world. This plethora of records, its noticeable diversity of genres, and its impressive temporal and spatial extent suggest regularity, rather than coincidence, in its formation and distribution as a historical artefact. Yet, because of its immense size and extreme temporal and spatial spread, no attempt has ever been made to map this corpus in full.

This paper introduces the structure, programme, and preliminary observations of a three-year research project at Uppsala University which aims to produce an updated, global survey of cuneiform inscriptions in collaboration with existing text catalogues and data repositories. Harnessing GIS-aided remote sensing and spatial analysis coupled with digital humanities research tools, the project aims to explore our newfound technological ability to accurately capture, assess, and quantify the material imprint of this immense corpus. In so doing, the project will aim to make available an updated suite of attribute, spatial, and temporal metadata resources for free dissemination and reuse, as well as dedicated studies of corpus composition, linguistic landscapes, and the materiality of texts.