Universal Scripts Project

FAIN: PW-50441-09

University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)
Deborah Winthrop Anderson (Project Director: August 2008 to January 2013)

A research and development project to incorporate seventeen historical and minority language scripts into the Unicode standard for character representation.

Although computer users in many parts of the world can now communicate in hundreds of languages by using their own native writing systems, there are still linguistic minority groups, and users of historical writing systems, who cannot. This is because the letters and symbols of these scripts are not yet part of the international character encoding standard, known as Unicode. Since continued corporate interest and support for these scripts is uncertain, communication among the groups who use them, and long-term access to their written cultural and historical resources, is threatened -- creating a serious gap for humanities scholarship. This project will fund proposals to adopt five modern and twelve historical scripts into the standard, and will foster collaboration among scholars, users, and institutions to continue working on more proposals, so that computers will ultimately support all the world's scripts.