TLHdig is a community research tool that will expand as the body of cuneiform texts from Hittite sites continues to grow year by year.

Anyone entrusted with the edition of yet unpublished texts is invited to contribute their texts to the TLHdig corpus, just as anyone can add already published texts that have not yet been included (note that the full version of TLHdig, which will be launched in 2024, will comprise all published texts up to 2021).

If you want to add a new text to TLHdig, please register so that you can log in and access the Creator Interface. The Creator Interface will guide you step by step through the submission process. To start, click Create manuscript.

You will then be invited to add manuscript identifiers (e.g., an excavation or museum number) and further metadata, as far as they are available. You can also upload image files, such as photographs or drawings of the manuscript. Any data you enter in the submission process will be saved on the TLHdig server.

In the next step, you enter the transliteration of your manuscript in the transliteration window on the left side of your screen. In doing so, you should use only the appropriate Unicode characters. The different types of cuneiform signs and text elements are marked according to a simple set of rules, following the mark-down principle, which we call SimTex (Simple Text Entry):

• Any information on the part of the tablet you are transliterating is preceded by a percentage sign (e.g., %obv.)
• Any line number is followed by a hash tag (e.g., 1 # nu-kán or 1′ # nu-kán)
• Default language text (usually Hittite) is entered in lowercase letters (e.g., nu-uš-ma-aš)
• Sumerograms are entered in uppercase letters (e.g., LUGAL)
• Akkadograms after a space are preceded by an underscore (e.g., _A-NA É-ŠU)
• Determinative are surrounded by the degree sign (e.g., °GIŠ°BANŠUR)
• For damaged signs use only half brackets and square brackets (e.g., ⸢nu-uš⸣-ma-aš, ⸢nu⸣-uš-ma-aš, or nu-u[š-m]a-aš; do not use ⸢n⸣u-uš-ma-aš, ⸢nu⸣-⸢uš⸣-maš, or [nu⸣-uš-ma-aš)

These are the basic conventions that you will need all the time. For a full list of the text input conventions, go to the Documentation page. While you are entering the transliteration, you can already see the resulting rendered text on the right side, where the different types of cuneiform signs are marked by colour and according to the conventions we use in print. By choosing the tab “XML view”, you can also have a look at the resulting text in the XML markup language that is employed by TLHdig.

Any non-compliance with TLHdig standards will be highlighted at the beginning of the rendered line (⚠). It may be easy for you to correct some of these yourself, others may require study of the documentation. In any case, you can submit a transliteration even if it still contains error messages. These will then be addressed in the review process.

You can save your transliteration and continue working on it later. In order to submit your transliteration, you have to click the “Release transliteration” button. The editors of TLHdig will then be notified and enter your submission into the review process.

The review process will ensure that your transliteration is a standard-compliant machine-readable, annotated text and meets minimum quality standards of TLHdig as a research tool. This is not a thorough philological review, as would be appropriate for a full critical edition of a cuneiform text. You will be logged as the author of your text together with the original submission date. Your authorship will always be attached to the transliteration; the review process will also be logged.

If you want to enter a large amount of individual texts, the standard interface may be too clumsy for you. If so, we are happy to develop a pipeline with you that is tailored to your requirements. Please contact tlhdig@uni-wuerzburg.de

Once the review process is completed, your transliteration will be published on the TLHdig platform with your authorship clearly declared under a CC BY SA license. The editors will notify you of the publication. The inclusion of your transliteration in TLHdig does not prevent you from any other kind of publication.

Your transliteration is connected to all the metadata that you entered in the text entry process as well as to your name as the author and the logged review history. The transliteration is encoded in the markup language XML. The code contains information on the graphic and linguistic characteristics of your text in a standard, machine-readable form.

The lexical and morphological annotation of the Hittite text is produced automatically with a tool developed within the HFR project. Within TLHdig, this automatic annotation is not validated manually. This means that it will contain many ambiguous and contextually incorrect annotations, particularly with heterographic writings. If you wish to validate the lexical and morphological annotation of your transliterations and thereby create higher-quality data, do join the TLHdig team.