Announcement
21 December 2004
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a two-year grant to UC
Berkeley for the Universal Scripts Project to support research and authoring of
sixteen Unicode script proposals, and to further the project's more general
effort of encouraging collaboration among scholars, users, and institutions in
encoding scripts not yet in the Unicode Standard. The grant runs from January
2005 through December 2006 and will be led by Dr. Deborah Anderson. The
Universal Scripts Project is a continuation of the Script Encoding Initiative
established at UC Berkeley in 2002.
Currently, users of scripts not in the Unicode Standard must rely on
non-standard fonts, specialty software, and other work-arounds to be able to use
their script in email, on webpages, and in electronic documents generally. As a
result of this project, users will have digital access to their written cultural
and historical resources and not be "locked out" of the digital world. It also
will enable libraries and companies currently involved in scanning multilingual
texts and making them available electronically to index the texts and make them
searchable over the Internet.
This grant will significantly speed up the progress of encoding the over eighty
scripts not yet in Unicode. Five historic scripts are earmarked for immediate
work on this project, including the basic set of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Eleven
modern scripts will also be prepared for encoding. The modern scripts are used
by minorities in Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa. The number of
minority language users of these scripts is over 20 million.
The Universal Scripts Project is a long-term project that seeks to promote the
encoding of all the world's writing systems into Unicode. It works closely with
individuals, groups, and governments on proposals and encourages other groups to
work on proposals.
The NEH grant represents the first significant financial support by a U.S.
agency for Unicode script proposals. It complements seed-funding from UNESCO's
Initiative B@bel , a project that has funded work on the N'ko and Balinese
scripts, as well as private donations.
As part of the conditions of the grant, third party donations must be raised and
will be matched, dollar-for-dollar, up to $40,000. To make a donation, see
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/#Donate. Donations made in December 2004
and later to the Script Encoding Initiative are eligible for this project and federal matching.
If donors agree to have their donation matched, a short note should be included
with the check (or, if an online donation, in the "Special Instructions for
this gift" field of the online
donation page) stating that the donor agrees for the funds to be used for the NEH-funded
Unicode script encoding project.
For further information, please contact the Project Leader:
Deborah Anderson
Dept. of Linguistics
1203 Dwinelle Hall #2650
Berkeley, CA 94720-2650
USA
E-mail: dwanders @ socrates . berkeley . edu