Lecture by Deborah Anderson, March 14, 2008

The Script Encoding Initiative and Language Teaching and Scholarship for Minority and Historic Languages on the Web

by Deborah Anderson, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley

The Script Encoding Initiative (SEI), a project in the Linguistics Department, helps user communities and scholars get various writing systems into Unicode, the international character-encoding standard.  Ultimately, the result of the project is to make it possible to send, view, and search for text on the Web, written in minority and historic scripts, a boon for language teaching and research.  To date SEI has helped get over 30 scripts into Unicode.  However, approximately 60 scripts remain to be encoded, and hurdles involving political, sociological, and technological issues have presented themselves, making the push to encode the final set of scripts – and make them readily accessible on the computer – a challenge.

Friday, March 14, 2008
3:00-5:00 pm
370 Dwinelle Hall