Here’s the link to the recent announcement.
I say “finished” because, having been begun in 1921, many volumes are now outdated. But it’s still a great achievement.
The CAD is available for free in PDF (or you can buy all the volumes for $1400).
I mention the CAD on this blog since it was one of the tools I used to create a video showing people how to search through (perish the thought) actual data to debunk the ancient astronaut nonsense of Zecharia Sitchin. Here’s the link for what I mean, and the link to the video is available therein.
yeah, i downloaded out of curiosity one of that free pdf’s and what i see!? even with such a high and prestigious intellectual work in adobe reader pdf properties i see no titles, no authors, no keywords or subject … all pdf form fields filled with emptiness! only locked, i mean encrypted with adobe 128 rc4 key to prevent further document modification, which is ok but also copy locked which is insane! no document structure, no TOC, no index to jump to any part of pdf, only simple plain pages
a proper electronic document integrity strategy which can be used and should be used as online bibliographic reference means much more in XX century! where is digital signatures? institutional digital signatures? authors digital signatures? nothing!
so, if i put this pdf, 40 MiB, in my nook e-book reader will be listed as cad_a1.pdf with no title or author! is such a pity that so many good pdf is authored as second class entities with no intended use as academic reference documents by other scientific peers!
one more thing i spotted, character encoding is plain old ansi! lol! utf-8 is still too high tech for an academic document!
;-|
I don’t speak the techno-language you’re using, but I have all the volumes and they open on Adobe reader just fine. SOME of the older volumes are all scans, though, and not searchable. Trust me (and I can’t use names here because of my line of work), but few people at the Oriental Institute have any sort of technological bent *at all*. Only people under 30 there (and there aren’t many of those, and none who make decisions on how to use grant money) are beyond the card catalogue and paper and pencil. I know this by experience, sad to say. A PDF is advanced technology for them.
true! pdf’s are ok, not huge even if is only scanned texts, good visual quality, but my dismay is not about raw information but this lack of any high level information structure! this lack of any digital technology bend & vision is a real and pity problem because this CAD volumes is all about a huge amount of raw information! scanned papers pdfs with to text ocr layer!? or with text layers but not external accesible because of enforced pdf copy lock layer! whoa! with so much info pushed out for free this lack of techno babble vision is embarrassing!
when you want to publish a huge amount of information in digital form why to make such silly and costly shortcuts when you can do all work right once and after that all information will be preserved and digitally accessible for eternity until the end of time with accessibility and availability cost tumbling down to almost nothing!? indexed and available for anybody, anywhere! with proper digital signatures to ensure authenticity of sources!
this is why such huge academic work is done, to gather all assirian language information in one place not so? and after that how you will access this huge amount of data? reading page by page? its so silly and not so academic when you have already better and cheap solutions!
and one more silly choice, after i lectured a little this dictionary:
no real assiriano-akkadian writing! no real cuneiforms! not a single one!!!! only latin transcripts of pretended assirian spoken words but in latin letters clothes and its english equivalents! no one example of raw cards from the bulk of > 1 Million cards used as primary references! in that cards i think is not only latin transcripts but also its cuneiform equivalents not so!? why this huge omission in a pretended ancient language dictionary!? lack of akkadian utf-8 text standard? lol!
this is funny, with such a surrealist dictionary if i dig out from my backyard a real sumerian clay tablets and try to interpret/read its writings using this CAD dictionary is a futile enterprise with null results …
all real cuneiform texts is hidden as bibliographic references to other writings! at least they should use real pictures of real cuneiforms corpus texts for each translated word of course with proper links to its authoritative sources! with no such things all this work is even less valuable, requiring a lot of duplicate work every time someone want to use CAD dictionary to translate assirian texts to modern languages!
agreed – personally, we at Logos could do the CAD in a much more usable format. It’s what we do. But Chicago just doesn’t care.
This is also why the real cutting edge database material is online – see http://www.anelanguages.com/?page_id=3 (a site of mine that gets occasional attention; a work in progress).
whoa! thanks! i do not know that is so many akkadian online resources, even an computer program dictionary where i can see some REAL cuneiforms and its translated forms …
now we can only hope that more scholars will see the light and power of world internet database … when we need to handle ancient clay tablets in huge quantities, i mean millions of real clay tablets and number is growing, only distributed work and databases can do an real and efficient work …
and to blow up any conspiracy theory and hidden layers of informations direct access to this databases by layman peoples is a good thing! bible hidden math code, nibiru planets, ancient astronauts, lost or hidden biblical texts and all crazy conspiracy theories will be much easier to be invalidated and fought with a real-time online access to all ancient text databases! old hebrew, old egyptians, old chinese, old greeks, sumerian and so on … something like a iron-age wikipedia, bronze-age wikipedia or at least google knol variant when proper scholarship attribution is on stake and even a little money stream for a good work and so on … a lot of work but not impossible with millions of online tipping monkeys!