A few years ago I obtained some scans of records from WWI for my grandfather's unit on the Western Front. All the reports were written in English, but using elaborate 'copperplate' script, which I imagine is very difficult for automatic OCR - it was difficult for me to read as a native English speaker and reader - imagine writing like that in some wet shell-straddled trench.
Once tablets are reconstructed, perhaps releasing some kind of 3D scans (raw laser and meshes) for an open competition, with decent prize could be productive (like the prize for the Herculaneum scrolls in the news this week).
The situation is even worse for cuneiform. With English, you're looking at approximately 70 glyphs including upper case, lower case, digits, and punctuation. Cuneiform throws you into the hundreds of glyphs. And their forms change over time, often drastically.
For 3D scanning, Reflectance Transformation Imaging is pretty cheap, easy, and popular for imaging tablets.
A few years ago I obtained some scans of records from WWI for my grandfather's unit on the Western Front. All the reports were written in English, but using elaborate 'copperplate' script, which I imagine is very difficult for automatic OCR - it was difficult for me to read as a native English speaker and reader - imagine writing like that in some wet shell-straddled trench.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperplate_script
Once tablets are reconstructed, perhaps releasing some kind of 3D scans (raw laser and meshes) for an open competition, with decent prize could be productive (like the prize for the Herculaneum scrolls in the news this week).