Universal Scripts Project

FAIN: PA-51171-05

University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)
Deborah Winthrop Anderson (Project Director: July 2004 to May 2008)

Incorporation into the Unicode standard of 14 historical and minority language scripts.

While the scripts most commonly used today can be viewed and sent electronically over the Internet, those of about 30 linguistic minorities and 60 historical scripts cannot, as they are not included in the international character encoding standard,Unicode. Without a standardized encoding, digital access to texts in these scripts is difficult. Since continued corporate interest is uncertain, access to the written cultural & historical resources of many groups is in danger of being cut off. This project will fund Unicode proposals for 9 modern and 5 historical scripts, and foster collaboration among scholars, users, and institutions to continue work on script proposals so that computers will ultimately support all scripts.