History of the project

Giorgio Buccellati – December 2020, August 2024
Marco De Pietri – August 2024

Introduction

The 4Banks project has gone through a long developmental process, which was conditioned by a number of concurrent factors, such as the innovations in hard- and software, the growth of interests in my own personal research, and most of all the maturation of a critical reflection about digital methods.

The Cybernetica Mesopotamica website describes the history of the Four Banks project within the wider framework of that project, which includes other clusters as well.

The Critique website contains a detailed history of the process relating to the archaeological dimension.

Here I will sketch the overall progress of the bibliographical project, which spans by now a full half a century.

Phase 1. Pre-digital: Akkadian Grammatical Studies (1970-96)

While working on A Structural Grammar of Babylonian, I began to compile a systematic bibliography that aimed to cover the full range of studies going back to the earliest phases of the research. In the preface (p. x) I described what I envisaged would appear as a separate volume, entitled A Critical Review of Akkadian Grammatical Studies. I had in fact worked on this in the 1970’es and 80’es, but I did not finish preparing the volume for publication. Part of the reason was that, by the time the Grammar was published in 1996, I had begun to explore possibilities of publishing the Critical Review in digital format, even though it was not clear at that point what format this would take, much less how it would be possible.

The work on the projected Critical Review volume was important in two respects:

conceptually, it stimulated my thinking on how to make the data available in ways that might be more flexible than through the printed page, opening the way for the whole methodological approach that underlies now the 4Banks approach;
substantively, it provided the initial core for the current version of Akk-lg.net, with some three hundred bibliographical entries and portions of the introductory chapters. It also laid the groundwork for the effort at going back to the earliest phases in the development of the discipline, and thus to arrive at an understanding, beyond the documentary information, of the growth of awareness that conditions our approach today, from the very beginning of the scholarly tradition.

Phase 2. Early digital: Companion websites (2000-13)

The Akkadian Grammatical Studies project lay dormant after publication of the Structural Grammar of Babylonian, but the idea of a bibliographical “companion” came up again as I began preparing for publication some volumes on other aspects of Mesopotamian civilization. The first two were on religion and politics. They appeared respectively in 2012 as «Quando in alto i cieli…» La spiritualità mesopotamica a confronto con quella biblica (translated to Spanish in 2021 and English in 2023) and in 2013 as Alle origini della politica. La formazione e la crescita dello stato in Siro-Mesopotamia (to appear in English in 2024).

I resumed the idea of a bibliographical companion, which by now had come to be clearly defined as a website, and I again so indicated in the preface to each of the two volumes. In the religion volume I wrote (p. XXIII):

"I do not offer any documentation here. The reader can find it instead online at www.giorgiobuccellati.net. Besides bibliographic references and an evaluation of some of the current strands of critical analysis, especially with those that most diverge from my own analysis, there are also thematic explorations in a more technical style, notes to the various chapters, and excursuses on related subjects."

In the volume on politics I wrote (p. XXVI):

"Really meant as an essay on political institutions, this volume does not intend to offer a systematic presentation of the relative facts of the political and cultural history of Mesopotamia, although obviously it follows its outline. I refer to the essential facts for a comprehension of the arguments in an indicative and selective way but without giving either documentation or bibliographic support. For this purpose, I link to a particular section of my personal website, www.giorgiobuccellati.net, a section which I am developing and will be open to the public in the future."

In the intervening time I have indeed worked on these websites, and they are all the richer now as a consequence. The website on religion will open in late 2024. Work is progressing on the politics and language websites, and they are expected to open in early and late 2025, respectively.

Phase 3. Structuring: Critique (2014-17)

The first website to actually open was critique-of-AR.net (CAR), in 2017. This was the first to achieve an adequate internal coherence, thanks to the contribution of Laerke Recht.

A detailed history of the project will be found in the CAR website. Here a few salient points may be emphasized.

With CAR, the website structure came to be defined substantially as it remains today. In particular, and especially through the work of Laerke Recht, the sections containing excerpts, themes and monographs acquired full consistency: this is at the basis of the interplanar aspect that distinguishes the project (see also below)

The notion of a research group took shape, thanks especially to a grant from the Catholic University of Milan. This aspect is being currently considerably expanded (see below).

The role of Laerke Recht was essential in achieving our goals. This was especially important as we wanted to give closure to the website before opening it. The idea of remaining ever mindful of the website as a meaningful and coherent whole conditioned all our work, and it posed a special intellectual difficulty. The constant reciprocal interaction as we were working on the project, and Laerke’s keen eye for detail, ensured that, in its final version, the website be as intended.

The notion of an editorial board was also an important element of the website. We wanted to rely on external expertise, especially as we were defining our goals, and we found the editorial board to be particularly useful in helping us to gain the self-confidence needed for this task.

Phase 4. Programming: Critique, Religion, Politics (2017-23)

[Section authored by Marco De Pietri]

Early editing of the Critique-of-AR website was done working directly with HTML. In 2017, Bernardo Forni began work on a program that would facilitate the input and produce a variety of outputs. But we also began to work in earnest on two other aspects of the project that depended on programming. These three aspects may be described as follows.

Data handling

The first version of CAR (2017) already contains a first description of the program: Digital Analysis of Bibliographical Information (DABI). The primary goal to make it easier to produce the input for the website, and to have the program not only transform the input into a display format (in HTML) that was particular suited for our specific interests, but also produce indices and tabulations.

Transition to MID: in the past decades, these companion websites were written in shere HTML format; during the years, two main limits of this language emerged:

the necessity of creating high-frames, which made the writing of the main page and the side bars a long-time effort;
it was no possible to have stable URL or hyperlinks, for which redirects were a necessity.

In order to avoid these, and other related issues, our programmer and webmaster Bernardo Forni wrote a new program (MID, Markdown Input to Display) converting pages written in Markdown, a much easier and faster language, to HTML format; besides this time-saving aspect, this new program also allowed to solve the two aforementioned technical limits. .

A separate program (MNI, Multi-Nodal Indices) was written by Jonah Lynch to produce a multi-nodal index of the data.

Interoperability

It was important for the various websites to interact with each other so as to constitute a coherent cluster, one that would make it possible to have a fully interplanar system among them. This has already been implemented to some extent within the Religion and the Politics websites, but will be one of the major upcoming goals.

Archival versions

We also wanted to have an archival system that would allow us to close a given version while working on a new one. Difficulties arose concerning aspects such as the portability of hyperlinks, but the system is basically already operative for Critique, Religion and Politics,

Phase 5. Current goals (2024)

Work is in progress for the two websites on Akkadian and on Literature.

Besides refinements in the programming, two major systemic aspects are currently affecting the project.

Research groups

The notion of research group as first established for the Critique website, is being thoroughly revised, with a view to establish a continuing seminar. This has been effectively implemented by Jonah Lynch for Religion and by Marco De Pietri for Politics.

In particular, the Religion research group served as the testing ground for Jonah Lynch’es dissertation at the University of Pavia: Method and Intelligence. Digital Approaches to Memory and Communication in Historiography (Lynch 2024 Ph D).

Full transition to a digital core narrative

The early version of each of the bibliographical websites served as a companion for a printed book: this meant that the core narrative was not properly digital, even though the substance was reproduced (for Religion and Politics), in a digital summary version.

We are currently planning a second edition of the Critique website, and this will include a fully digital core narrative, more readily integrated with the bibliographical information.