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If we wanted to digitize all ancient texts, what would it take? How many are there? Starting at the beginning of written history ~5,200 years ago to ~2,000 years ago, how many texts do we have from each millenia or century? Are they accessible to be digitized?

What about earlier symbols and similar potential communication? For example, caves sometimes have marks that seems to have some symbolic meaning, such as slashes that seem like counts. How many are there to digitize?

I'm curious about the scale of it.

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Discussion

Pro sanum pecunium 9mo ago

Specifically for cuneiform, there are multiple efforts, covering roughly the time period you mentioned. There is this post, [1], and [2].

There are probably around 1-2 million cuneiform tablets that have been found so far.

Many of them complete, but even more of them as fragments.

Those fragments mostly just sit around in store rooms. It's a giant puzzle few people even have enough knowledge to attempt.

1: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/

2: https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/

Jans studieblog 9mo ago

More than $5 million, probably less than $100 million, probably - would need a team of qualified experts to know what to photograph and record, a team trained to handle delicate and valuable artifacts, IT people, machine learning experts, gophers, grunts, and finally a team of people to work with institutions.

It's not a super complex endeavor, logistically speaking.

I don't think it'll ever happen. Some institutions would resist being part of any third party scaled up attempt to record things, others would demand editorial control, and the most asinine petty politics would gum things up.

If only there was a billionaire on #nostr to take the lead in setting up a project like this 🤔

🫣 at nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m

jared 9mo ago

I’ll handle the Library of Alexandria - oh wait

Too soon?