SUMMARY OF PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY
Seven years
undergraduate and graduate work in Ancient Near Eastern and Classical languages.
Extensive experience in C, C++, and Java programming languages. Background in
professional photography and cinematography. Organized Initiative for Cuneiform
Encoding that saw cuneiform accepted into Unicode. Originated and manages
Digital Hammurabi Project.
EDUCATION
1974-76
Hebrew/Greek, University of Oklahoma
1976-78 B.A. German, Southern
Connecticut State University
1978-1983 Graduate work in Comparative
Semitics, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago
RESEARCH AND
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
1983-1984 Cuneiform tablet photography -
Oriental Institute, University of Chicago
1984-1987 Residential Construction
- Chicago, IL
1987-1992 CEO & Software Engineer, Zora Enterprises
1992-1995 Lead Software Engineer (groupware products), Powercore Inc.,
Manteno, IL
1995-1998 Lead Software Engineer (groupware, email, LAN
conferencing), CE Software, Des Moines, IA
1999-2002 Senior IT Specialist,
Humanities, Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, Johns Hopkins University
2002-2003 Scholarly Technology Specialist, Manager of Digital Hammurabi
Project, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University
2004-
Assistant Research Scholar, Manager of Digital Hammurabi Project, Computer
Science Department, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University
SELECTIVE TIMELINE OF INVOLVEMENT IN DIGITAL
HAMMURABI
1999/10/8-9
Electronic Publication of Ancient Near
Eastern Texts
Oriental Institute, University of Chicago
Milestone
conference for the use of electronic resources in Ancient Near Eastern studies.
With funding from Lee Watkins' Research & Instructional Technologies
group, I, along with Bob Black and Bruce Wells, Hopkins graduate students in
Near Eastern Studies, attend this international conference. I proposed to the
conference two agenda items - the computer encoding of cuneiform and 3d scanning
of cuneiform tablets. I was encouraged to pursue these endeavors, since no one
knew of anyone else doing them. On the drive back the three of us brainstormed
ideas and got very excited about the possibilities.
1999 October &
November
I began contacting people about the possibilities of 3D scanning
and computer encoding of cuneiform:
Lee Watkins, Director, Hopkins Research
& Instructional Technologies
Dr. John Winter, Hopkins Materials Science
& Engineering, about 3D scanning
Dr. Bradley Boone, Physicist, Hopkins
Applied Physics Laboratory
Edwin Hart, IT, Hopkins Applied Physics
Laboratory
John Jenkins, Apple System Software Engineer for Fonts OS9
Rick McGowan, Apple System Software Engineer for Fonts OSX, Unicode vice
President
Dr. Larry Wolff, Professor of Computer Science, JHU
Dr. Kofi
Laing, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, Tufts University
Dr. Gregory Crane, Professor of Classics and Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus
Project at Tufts University
Patrick Durusau, Director of Technology, Society
of Biblical Literature
Dr. Bruce Zuckerman, West Semitic Research Project,
USC
1999/11/9
First APL Meeting
Dr. Brad Boone, Supervisor,
Electro-Optical Systems, Missile Engineering Branch, Air Defense Systems Dept
Dr. Donald Duncan, Senior Engineer, Fourier Optics, Electro-Optical Systems
Group, APL
Dr. Kevin Baldwin, Senior Staff Engineer, Electro-Optical Systems
Group
me
The APL people expressed great interest in pursuing the
project.
1999/12/1
First Computer Science Meeting
Dr. Mike
Goodrich, Professor of Computer Science
Dr. Jonathan Cohen, Assistant
Professor of Computer Science
Dr. Subodh Kumar, Assistant Professor of
Computer Science
3 graduate students
me
Everyone was eager to pursue
this project; said it fit in perfectly with work they wanted to do.
2000/2/13
I met with Dr. Andreas Andreou, Professor Electrical and
Computer Engineering and two of his graduate students and brainstormed about
various technologies useful for 3D surface scanning - laser rangefinder, atomic
force microscopy, shape from shading using multiple lights, ultrasound, etc.
2000/11/2-4
First ICE Conference
Following months of emails with
leading cuneiformists and Unicode experts I organized the first international
Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding (ICE) conference at Hopkins. Funded by Lee
Watkins (Hopkins Research & Instructional Technologies), Jim Neal (Hopkins
Library), Gary Ostrander (Krieger School of Arts & Sciences), and Joey
Zacharias (KSAS Magazine), the conference was an unqualified success, producing
a unanimous statement of agreement on methodologies for encoding cuneiform and
the electing a working group.
2000/11/17
Formal Project
Lee
suggests we formally begin a cross-discipline "Virtual Cuneiform Project" at
Hopkins and present the idea to Dr. Ted Poehler, Vice Provost of Research.
2000/11/20
Borger Cuneiform Materials
I telephoned Dr. Rykle
Borger in Germany and got his permission to use unpublished materials from his
forthcoming 3rd edition of his book on cuneiform signs - Mesopotamsches
Zeichenlexikon.
2001/2/8
Visit with Ted Poehler
Lee & I met
for one hour with Ted Poehler, Vice Provost for Research. The meeting went very
well. Dr. Poehler was very interested in the project and saw it as a
cross-discipline, Hopkins-wide, endeavor. He also emphasized the possible
broader applications for any technology we might develop. On the way back to
Lee's office in Krieger Hall, Lee & I both stopped on the sidewalk when we
realized in the course of our discussion about the data size for one high
resolution 3D scan that it was one thing to pay for the hardware and software
development of a 3D scanner, but quite another thing to plan for a petabyte
scale digital library. That's when we realized that the digital library side of
this project was immense.
2001/2/16
Lee begins researching funding
for the project, discovers NSF's interest in cuneiform (Cuneiform Digital
Library Initiative, UCLA), and suggests NSF for a grant proposal.
2001/2/22
First Digital Hammurabi Team Meeting
Lunch at the
Hopkins Faculty Club
Lee Watkins, Hopkins Director of Research &
Instructional Technologies
Dr. Jerrold Cooper, Professor of Assyriology
& Sumerian, Near Eastern Studies Department
Dr. Bradley Boone, Principal
Professional Staff, RF Engineering, Applied Physics Laboratory
Dr. Donald
Duncan, Principal Professional Staff, Electro-Optical Systems, Applied Physics
Laboratory
Wolfger Schneider, Principal Professional Staff, Electronic
Services, Applied Physics Laboratory
Dr. Jonathan Cohen, Assistant
Professor, Computer Graphics, Computer Science Department
Dr. Subodh Kumar,
Assistant Professor, Computer Graphics, Computer Science Department
Darren
Lacey, Licensing Associate, Technology Transfer
me, Senior Information
Technology Specialist, Humanities
We discuss intellectual property issues,
candidate technologies, and funding strategies. The team formally begins working
together.
2001/03/07
CDLI Collaboration
Jerrold Cooper contacts
Robert England of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative at UCLA, who offers
his support in scanning tablets with our scanners.
2001/04/11
World's First Unicode Cuneiform Font Commissioned by Hopkins
On my
recommendation, Lee Watkins approves funds to commission Linguist's Software to
produce the world's first Unicode cuneiform font, based on Borger's fonts for
MZL.
2001/04/26
First 3D Scan from APL
Don Duncan emails first
cuneiform 3D point cloud data from APL's optics lab.
2001/05/14
Library Executive Support
Lee and I meet with Jim Neal, Dean, University
Libraries to discuss the desirability and feasibility of moving the Digital
Hammurabi project under the aegis of Lee Watkins and the Center for Scholarly
Research in the Library. The goal would be to provide high level, long term,
managerial and fund-raising support for the project. The meeting was very
encouraging, with Dean Neal agreeing to give executive support once all
stakeholders agree to such an arrangement (which they did).
2001/05/30
First Rendering from Computer Science
First images from Computer Science
rendering APL's first tablet scan.
2001/10/5
Simultaneous Fiducial
Scanning
I suggest simultaneous fiducial scanning of top and bottom of
tablet to help in stitching separate scans.
2001/11/09-13
Scholarly
Support and Collaboration
Simo Parpola Collaborates with Digital Hammurabi
Dr. Simo Parpola, director of the State Archives of Assyria, Helsinki,
consultant to the Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding, enthusiastically agrees to
collaborate with us in his online Corpus of Neo-Assyrian text database.
Initially this would take the form of linking their Neo-Assyrian text
transliterations to our 3D images.
In addition, Dr. Piotr Michalowski,
University of Michigan, Editor, Journal of Cuneiform Studies, Dr. Steve Tinney,
University of Pennsylvania, curator of tablets, director, Pennsylvania Sumerian
Dictionary Project, and Dr. Robert Englund, UCLA, Director, Cuneiform Digital
Library Project, all go on record as supporting the Digital Hammurabi
Project.
2001/11/13
Submitted Digital Hammurabi grant proposal to
National Science Foundation/ITR .
2002/04/19
NSF Award
We receive
notice that NSF has accepted our grant proposal for funding - one of the
reviewers said "our proposal was head-and-shoulders above the others they
reviewed, and among the best of it's kind they'd seen in years."
2002/05/06
First 3D Vendor Demonstration & Scan
Surphaser of
Philadelphia demonstrated their technology at Hopkins and scanned a tablet for
us.
2002/05/21
Digital Hammurabi in USA Today
USA Today has
article on cuneiform and talks about Digital Hammurabi.
2002/05.29
Oriental Institute Tablet Support
Gene Gragg, then Director of the
Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, voices interest in, and support for,
Digital Hammurabi scanning of tablets.
2002/05/31
First Contact with
Arius3D
Lee Watkins runs across a reference to Arius3D, a Canadian 3D
scanning bureau, and I contacted them. We learn about Marc Rioux's inventions at
the National Research Council of Canada, which were licensed by
Arius3D.
2002/06/18
First Arius3D Visit
Don Duncan, Subodh Kumar,
and I travel to Arius3D and have scans made of some of our tablets.
2002/07/01
Dean Full-Time on Digital Hammurabi
I begin full-time
work as a Scholarly Technology Specialist in the Library and manager of DH
project, funded by the NSF grant.
2002/07/02-04
Leiden, Netherlands,
48th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale
I attended the 48th RAI in
Leiden and, among other things, visited at length with Dr. Rykle Borger,
Goettingen University, and author of the forthcoming Mesopotamische
Zeichenliste. Borger re-iterated his support for the Initiative for Cuneiform
Encoding project and promised to continue to provide us with his materials as
they became available. I travelled to London and met for an hour with
Christopher Walker, keeper of cuneiform tablets, British Museum, and discussed
the possibility of scanning their tablet collections. I delivered a presentation
to the Rencontre on the progress in Digital Hammurabi & ICE.
2002/07/18
Resolution Targets for 3D
Don Duncan proposes we
machine high resolution 3D targets to test actual resolutions and accuracies
achieved by the various scanners.
2002/09/19
UPenn Tablet Scan
Permission
Jerrold Cooper and I visit with Dr. Steve Tinney, curator of
tablets at University of Pennsylvania Museum, and director of Pennsylvania
Sumerian Dictionary Project, to discuss access to tablets for scanning.
2002/10/18
Library of Congress Data Center
I met with Mercedes
Baird, CIO of the Library of Congress, and discussed large data center
requirements.
2002/10/28
Dell 7 EMC2 Talks
Eliot Metsger and I
met with Dell and EMC2 about data center and mass storage plans.
2002/11/18
Software AG, Tamino Visit
Eliot Metsger, Mark Cyzyk,
and I met with Software AG, Tamino XML database people.
2002/11/23
DH & ICE at Society for Biblical Literature Convention
I discussed
Digital Hammurabi and ICE work with various attendees at the Society for
Biblical Literature in Toronto - Philip Payne of Linguist's Software, Chuck
Jones, Oriental Institute, Patrick Durusau, SBL, Dr. Wayne Pitard, Ugaritic
scholar at University of Illinois, Deborah Anderson, Linguistics, UC Berkeley,
Sandra Schloen, XML Specialist, Oriental Institute, and Dr. Bruce Zuckerman,
West Semitic Inscriptions and InscriptiFact, USC.
2002/11/26
Trip to
National Research Council of Canada
Don Duncan and I visit Marc Rioux and
team at the National Research Council of Canada, Visual Information Technology
Group, and have scans made of 5 tablets and 2 resolution targets. I estimated
there was a 3- to 4-fold increase in information simply by switching to 3D
display when viewing the tablets. The reported resolution was 100 microns. Don
thought this was the best technology for our application we had encountered to
date.
2003.02.16
Baltimore Sun Article on DH
An article in the
Baltimore Sun newspaper, Sunday edition, focuses on Digital Hammurabi at APL and
Hopkins.
2003/02/24
Levoy Visit to Hopkins
Dr. Marc Levoy,
Associate Professor, Computer Graphics, Stanford, Director, Digital Michelangelo
Project, presented at Hopkins Computer Science seminar. The Digital Hammurabi
team had lunch with him. He agreed to share his 3D algorithms with us.
2003/03/22
Museums & the Web 2003 Presentation
Lee and I
present at Museums & the Web 2003 conference in Charlotte, NC.
2003/03/26-31
Berlin Trip
I attended the Open Archives Forum
Workshop in Berlin. The workshop focused on multimedia metadata harvesting. I
interjected an awareness of 3D objects into the discussions and planning. I met
for 4 hours with Dr. Peter Damerow, Max Planck Institute, mathematician
specializing in the epistemology of cuneiform mathematics and one of the
principals in the CDLI project, and with Urs Schoepflin, head of the Library,
Max Planck Institute. They expressed an eagerness to collaborate with us in
scanning and publishing 3D cuneiform tablets.
2003/04/05
American
Oriental Society
I organized a 2 hour luncheon meeting at AOS in Nashville
with ten of the leading cuneiformists in the US - Richard Averbeck, Giorgio
Buccellati, Jerrold Cooper, Madeleine Fitzgerald, William Hallo, Cale Johnson,
Piotr Michalowsk, David Owen, Matthew Stolper, and Niek Veldhuis. We discussed
methodological issues related to encoding cuneiform.
2003/04/29
Apple Donation
Lee Watkins arranges a meeting with Apple executives.
Keith Kaneda and I met with them for 4 hours. Apple donated an xServe and 2.5
terabyte RAID to the Digital Hammurabi Project.
2003/06/05-06
ICE2
Conference
I organized the second international conference of the Initiative
for Cuneiform Encoding at Hopkins, where we finalized plans for the formal
Unicode proposal, authored by Michael Everson, Karljuergen Feuerherm, and Steve
Tinney. The cuneiform sign repertoire embodied in the ICE proposal was a truly
historic milestone in cuneiform studies, representing, as it does, the merger of
three of the most important cuneiform sign lists in the world, all of them
previously unpublished, and with some of them in development for more than 40
years. The authors of these three sign lists, Miguel Civil, Rykle Borger, and
Robert Englund, all gave ICE permission to use their unpublished materials in
generating the sign repertoire for the Unicode encoding. Dr. Steve Tinney, Dr.
Madeleine Fitzgerald, and Cale Johnson did most of the editing of the
repertoire. Steve Tinney created the Cuneiform Classic font for the proposal.
2003/07/09
49th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, British
Museum.
I presented progress report on Digital Hammurabi Project and
Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding.
2003/07/21
Visit with Christopher
Walker
I spent 4 hours visiting and eating lunch with Christopher Walker,
keeper of cuneiform tablets at the British Museum. We discussed efforts to
collaborate in 3D scanning of cuneiform tablets. He also located, and let me
photograph, an A = idu lexical tablet that had a reference I needed for an
article I am working on.
2003/11/03-07
I arranged for the the
Digital Hammurabi Project to host the Unicode Technical Committee meeting at
Hopkins in November 2003. It was at this meeting that we presented the first
formal proposal for encoding Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform.
2004/01/22
Alex Szalay Visit
I visited with Alex Szaly, Hopkins professor in the
Department of Physics and Astronomy, about his experience with large data center
requirements in his work with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. He sees good
opportunities for us to pool our resources for a very large scale data center at
Hopkins.
2004/02/03
Unicode Technical Committee Approval of
Cuneiform
The February 2004 Mountain View, CA meeting of the UTC favorably
received, with a few suggestions, the final proposal for encoding cuneiform.
2004/02/05
Jim Gray Visit
I visited with Jim Gray, Distinguished
Engineer in Microsoft's Scaleable Servers Research Group and manager of
Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC) and discussed large data center
issues. He is very interested in working with Alex Szalay and Digital Hammurabi
in implementing a petabyte scale, web-enabled database.
2004/06/15-25
Unicode & ISO 10646 Meetings in Toronto
I attended the June meetings
of the Unicode Technical Committee and Working Group 2 of the ISO 10646
committee in Toronto, where both groups unanimously approved the proposal to
encode cuneiform. All that's left to do before cuneiform is formally approved as
an international standard is the national balloting, which so far (December
2004) has been unanimously in favor of the proposal.
2004/09/01
Transferred to Computer Science
I transferred to the Computer Science
Department of the Whiting School of Engineering as an Assistant Research Scholar
in September of 2004, where I continue to work on coding user interfaces for 3D
cuneiform and Unicode encoded cuneiform text, and to continue working on the
funding and logistics for a petabyte scale data center at Hopkins for 3D
cuneiform texts.
Original: Click Here For Link to The Digital Hammurabi Project Link Page - Dean Arthur Snyder Digital Hammurabi Director, Research Fellow, Engineer, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.
Updated: Click Here For John Hopkins University 2008 Updated Link Page With 3D Scanner Active Visual Window Along With Current JHU.edu Digital Hammurabi Project Link Page - Dean Arthur Snyder Digital Hammurabi Director, Research Fellow, Engineer, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.
Click Here For Return To Daniel L. & Carolyn Sue Chesnut Link Page.