Since the inception of documents in a wide sense, humans have attempted to organise their thoughts, daily activities, secrets, etc. The information and tools that make up recorded history, like scripts, symbols, or signs are available in plenty. There are immense works already done by groups namely
Unicode Consortium
,
ScriptSource
,
Endangered Alphabets
and other
websites
. They provide a plethora of options like
standardising orthography
,
fonts
,
keyboards
and
learning materials
in order to give the users an idea of how the script works. The QWERTY
style keyboard
has become a synonymous standard for
every writing system
. However, the keyboard of a non-standard type for non-Latin scripts is not readily available. Even if keyboards do vary between different types of devices, the variety is mostly not substantially different from QWERTY itself. This implies the user learns their script with a certain format and must additionally learn new individual formats (depending on device type) for their script, which could all be averted. Therefore, this limit one’s capacity to express their thoughts effortlessly in a non-Latin (or be it even in Latin) based writing systems. That calls for a tool which could nurture experiences of writing in different scripts through self-exploration by building one’s own scribe instrument.
To bridge this gap, our pilot project
World Scripts Explorer
plays pivotal role any digital content creator. For those who wish to explore the use of a script in non-standard keyboard format as well as standard formats, the input instrument permits the mapping one’s own mental model of the script to their computational use and storage via the user interface. This
open source
tool offers value addition when it comes to aiding educators in epigraphy, palaeography, orthography and in a wide area of disciplines teaching ancient scripts and languages: the users can navigate between sorted types of writing systems, as well through a map interface. The interface has been modified based on feedback (daily users of non-Latin scripts and experts in Unicode) in the last 2 years. They can also filter based on historic timeline and search the writing systems. As the user types with a keyboard, suggestions are provided for many of the modern scripts. No user data is stored, ensuring the protection of privacy and accessibility of the website is partially accomplished. The user interface is available in multiple themes, in over 100 languages with keyboards being offered for over 200 scripts and additional 250 writing systems can be explored. We have incorporated the ability to use calculators (or numeral systems) in many scripts including non-base 10, e.g., Punic, Mayan, Chuvash, Avestan, Warang Citi, Sumerian, etc. The tool connects the information from aforementioned
website
for a better understanding of what a particular script entails, coalesce with dictionaries, thesauri and
transliteration services
. Once the website is loaded onto the browser, it could be used offline as well.
The intended user groups are not limited to academia. We have worked with script conservationists, teachers, hobbyists and user communities to advance
digitisation of scripts
(
Oduduwa for Yoruba community
, Beary for Byari community) and thus support these communities in further developing the education in their indigenous scripts. The tool also has a potential to help propagate minority or endangered language communities to incorporate a writing system to assist the intergenerational language dissemination and to enable a transmit of spoken only language towards writing them.
The vision is to include all graphical information systems in this tool incorporate the ability for the users to manually adjust the software keyboard layout. We also want to integrate layout projection onto a physical surface for better user experience with haptic feedback. Thus, this tool has the potential to enable content creators from all walks of life to scintillate their individualism when formulating their thoughts in their own language and script, thus addressing one important aspect of the inequality of access to technology for many communities.
External links