Introducing the 2025-26 Research Fellows: Studies in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Nigeria
We are very excited to announce the projects selected for this year’s SEI Research Fellows Program. This marks the first official year of the program, following last year’s pilot projects on Lampung (with Ariq Syauqi) and Bété (with Adam YEO).
The fellowship has two goals: first, to help SEI move into new areas of research and expand our circle of collaborators; and second, to provide an opportunity for relative newcomers to learn about script research and digitization. Fellows refine their projects in collaboration with SEI, then undertake their research during the fellowship year. Throughout, we provide guidance and administrative support. At the end, fellows share their work in a blog post and report.
This year’s fellows will not only document under-studied scripts, but also push us to reconsider some of the categories that guide our field—what counts as a script, what counts as evidence, and how variants and graphic systems are defined in relation to standards like Unicode.
We were able to fund three fellowships this year thanks to the generous donations received during this past spring’s Big Give campaign. Learn more about the projects and the individuals leading them below.
| Febri Muhammad Nasrullah Scripts: Kerinci, Bima, Sumbawa, Ende Field sites: Central Sumatra, Eastern Indonesia Biography: Febri Muhammad Nasrullah is an Indonesian script enthusiast currently studying cartography and remote sensing at Universitas Gadjah Mada. Since 2022, he has researched underrepresented indigenous scripts, documenting them and submitting proposals for their inclusion in the Unicode Standard. He also works with digital font creators on OpenType features and develops keyboard layouts to support the use of Indonesian scripts in digital environments. His background in human geography strengthens his focus on the cultural contexts of writing systems. |
We are pleased to have this opportunity to continue field research and proposal development on indigenous Indonesian scripts. This is an area where SEI has been working for some years, but was able to significantly expand the depth of our research and understanding through recent field-based projects and a growing number of contacts on the ground. Last year, Ariq Syauqi conducted research on Lampung and other southern Sumatra scripts, stopping just short of the central Sumatra region where Kerinci is used. That research resulted in insights for a updated Lampung proposal and an exhaustive review of the existing Rejang code block.1
Febri worked with us on that proposal, but he also has been advancing his own research on indigenous Indonesian scripts for several years.2 We were glad to combine forces with him, and have been continually impressed with the quality of his work.
Febri’s project will cover Kerinci, and three Buginese-derived script varieties in eastern Indonesia: Bima, Sumbawa, and Ende. As Febri described in his project description, “A major challenge in encoding these scripts is the lack of accessible primary sources and the limited availability of secondary literature. Many of these scripts were historically written on perishable materials, leading to significant loss of information.” The primary goal of his field visit will be to access private manuscript collections that will provide a new, rich source of data for the Unicode extensions to Buginese for these script varieties. His work also contributes to our ongoing interest in considering the boundaries and classifications between “script”, “extension,” and “variant,” as treated by the Unicode Standard.
| Julie Sayo Script: Kulitan Field site: Pampanga, Philippines Biography: Julie Sayo is a Filipina-American graphic designer and educator, and an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her research examines heritage and identity in graphic design, with a focus on typography. She is currently developing typefaces for Baybayin, the precolonial Tagalog script. |
Julie’s project comes at a serendipitous moment. She will be investigating Kulitan, the Kapampangan writing system of central Luzon in the Philippines. Kulitan is a historic script now undergoing a modern revival. Its present form is vertical, written top to bottom with columns running right to left, though historically it was also written with a horizontal orientation. Today it appears mainly in cultural and heritage contexts, but interest in the script has been growing among artists, designers, and community advocates.
A first proposal for Kulitan was written by SEI Technical Director Anshuman Pandey in 2015.3 We have since been working on an updated proposal, which dovetails nicely with Julie’s project. She will document contemporary visual materials that use Kulitan and analyze how these communications advance the script’s modern presence. She will also help build connections on the ground to ensure the proposal moves forward with community approval.
Beyond input towards the proposal, we’ll be working with Julie to see what the digital life of an unencoded script looks like: what types of materials do users produce, in what settings, and how do they line up against the traditional forms of printed evidence expected for a Unicode proposal? What is the best way to archive these materials in a privacy-conscious but systematic way?
| Jordan Williams Script: Nsibidi Field site: Southern Nigeria and Cameroon Biography: Jordan is a recent graduate of Texas State University with a BS in Digital Media Innovation. He has a huge interest in ideographic language systems and their modern day applications. Jordan’s core focus is on traditional and modern Nsibidi graphic expression, revitalizing ancient motifs for everyday use. |
The SEI Research Fellowship is not only designed to reinforce proposals already in progress, but to chart new areas for future work.4 Jordan’s project on Nsibidi is an excellent example of a project at its earliest stage, with exciting future possibilities. Nsibidi is a complex ancient system of ideographic and pictographic signs used in Nigeria and Cameroon. Some aspects are public, while others are kept private within communities. It has been recorded on cloth, wood, manuscripts, and other materials, as well as performed through gestures.
In part because of its association with secret societies, relatively little scholarship has been published on Nsibidi to date. Jordan, however, has been learning and writing publicly about the system for several years. Recently, he was invited to visit the Ekpe Society – one of the communities that maintains Nsibidi – to learn more about its historic and modern uses and to share this knowledge more widely.
One of the theoretical aims of this project is to revisit how systems like Nsibidi are categorized, probing the boundary between “graphic” and “writing” systems. We are thrilled to learn alongside Jordan about this important system. The goals are simple but ambitious: to document the 2,000+ known signs of Nsibidi and to gain a sense of what might be appropriate and desirable for public transmission. Projects like this are not immediately aimed at a Unicode proposal, but instead at building understanding and supporting future research and community-driven decisions about digitization.
We hope you are as excited about these projects as we are. If you have information about any of these scripts, please reach out – we would be glad to connect you with our fellows. We look forward to sharing updates on their work throughout the coming year.
- Rejang glyph error and code block review documents published here and here, respectively. ↩︎
- Examples include Bima, Lampung, Pegon, Kawi, Kerinci, and Sundanese (Several of these are earlier drafts that have since been superseded. Public versions may not yet be available). ↩︎
- View the 2015 document, “Towards an Encoding For Kulitan in Unicode” here. ↩︎
- One of the earliest Missing Scripts projects, by Morgane Pierson, focused on Nsibidi. Explore her work here. But SEI has never before considered working towards a Unicode proposal for it. ↩︎