
Untangling an Accounting Tool and an Ancient Incan Mystery - dnetesn
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/world/americas/untangling-an-accounting-tool-and-an-ancient-incan-mystery.html
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deadowl
Unless it's been cleaned up significantly, I don't really like the database
that Urton has (as of ~2-3 years ago). It is a great resource, but I'd have to
spend a few weeks trying to chew out the inconsistencies if I were to be able
to use it in a way that I would be comfortable analyzing. Much of the text
data is outright messy, which I guess is an artifact of hand-entry. Imagery
alongside the data would be nice. Aside from that, the biggest thing that
could probably be done to improve the data (at least to make it easier to
process) is to develop one or more serialized string forms for cords instead
of having solely a related table with individual knots.

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toivotuo
I spent quite a bit of time on the Urton database in 2006. Would need to dig
out the pre/post processing Perl scripts and see a more recent version of the
database.

An area that would also be ripe for computational analysis is the texts from
Spanish archives that are known to have been sourced from khipu readings.
"Pärssinen, Martti & Kiviharju, Jukka. Textos Andinos. Corpus de textos khipu
incaicos y coloniales. Tomo I & II" would be a good starting point.

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deadowl
Known or hypothesized?

