Script Encoding Initiative

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Progress overview, per year:

For detailed tracking of SEI work, please see our UTC Reports web page.

• Year 1 (2002-2003) of operation with seed funding provided by an anonymous benefactor, the Script Encoding Initiative has successfully shepherded a number of Unicode proposals through the standards process, including Kharosthi (written by Andrew Glass and Stefan Baums, University of Washington), several proposals for missing Greek characters (submitted by Maria Pantelia and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae project at UC Irvine). Deborah Anderson has given a number of presentations on the SEI project, including the Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data conference (Ypsilanti, Michigan, August, 2002 and Lansing, Michigan, July 2003), the Internationalization and Unicode Conference (San Jose, CA., September 2002; Atlanta, September 2003) the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting (Toronto, November 2002), and to the UC Berkeley Unicode and Text Encoding Working Group (Berkeley, CA, December 2002). These talks have been aimed at informing the linguistic and scholarly community of the endeavor and to encourage wider participation. Also, a number of grant proposals were submitted to funding agencies.
• Year 2 (2003-2004) was marked by continued support for work on script proposals (including Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, Phoenician, Old Persian cuneiform, N'Ko, Glagolitic, Coptic, and Buginese). A number of articles appeared on the project (see the Press page). The N'Ko proposal was developed with the financial and moral support of UNESCO within the framework of Initiative B@bel.
• Year 3 (2004-2005) included work on a large proposal covering nearly 1000 characters in the Gardiner set of Middle Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyphs.
• Year 4 (2005-2006) saw continued work on the Middle Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyph proposal, work to encode 5,910 Tangut (Xixia) characters, and more!
• Year 5 (2006-2007) still in progress, has already seen submission of completed Middle Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyph and Tangut proposals!