Bringing Writing to its Digital Counterpart: Designing a New Course in Script Technologies
During 2024, I was involved in a part-time job at the Department of Digital Humanities at the University of Cologne, and in the teaching assistantship capacity, I was required to conduct a summer semester course. I was given a choice to conduct either an existing course or create a new course of my own. Creating a new course from scratch, given the implications of the time and effort whilst managing my other part-time job at a private company and working on my research project for my doctoral degree, was certainly the tougher path, but I didn’t shy away from this challenge. I was motivated by the chance to apply my know-how of the subject material that I have come to enjoy, learn a tonne of new things along the way that would assist in easing my research project path finding, as well as experience first hand what my parents and relatives have done for years — that being the art of imparting knowledge through tutoring.
I come from the Sankethi community in Karnataka, India, then moved overseas for my Masters’ course in Media Informatics at RWTH Aachen in Germany. During the COVID-19 lockdowns (2021-2022), we passionately worked for months together on creating the World Scripts Explorer (an open-source project for use of custom keyboards layout with custom fonts: website). Later, I learned about the Endangered Alphabets Project and regularly joined meetings, through which I met the tutors of the Odùduwà script from Nigeria (who taught it among the Yorùbá communities) and met people from the Beary community (for Byari script), all of whom were wishing to digitise their writing systems.
Through these interactions I realised the various challenges that lie ahead for many people when it comes to making their writing digital. People who have the desire to create an identity for their community through writing need to build bridges with tech savvy individuals or groups who can enable such a community through their arduous journey of making the writing visible to the masses. I was also unable to find a course or exercise session at any university that provides such a holistic and niche perspective of the world that I was exposed to at that time. This idea was cemented further after a reading of the book by Tim Brookes, Writing Beyond Writing. After this, I stumbled onto the crossroads to create my own course at the university.
About the Course
This course, entitled “Preserve our shared Cultural Heritage – Recorded data, writing systems, scripts”, gives the students a sense of appreciation of the ever expanding field of writing systems, an overarching perspective through a digital humanities lens, and their own abilities to contribute towards a better cohesive society as a whole. The exercise-based course aims to tutor, share the know-how, and build a framework to understand the complex field of writing systems in addition to how one could go about creating or applying tools to bring writing to its digital counterpart. The process of creating the course was fully entrusted by Prof. Dr. Øyvind Eide after I had submitted my idea in depth. Once that was approved, I put it to practice through the summer semesters of 2024 and 2025 (volunteering even when I wasn’t employed at the department).
The course is conducted in English and is intended for Masters’ students from various programmes at the University. The students get a chance to learn about how various writing systems work at an overarching principle level; become familiar with Unicode processes; get to know the phenomena of script emergence, obsolescence, and revitalisation; consider how to inculcate best practices during product (or application) creation; and incorporate CARE and FAIR principles in their work ethos, availing Agile-Scrum methodology to improve productivity during their projects.
Through a series of sessions, students are tutored in a variety of topics, initially learning theory or any necessary background knowledge followed by a practical application phase. These topics include:
- Creating their own font for a writing system they are familiar with
- Creating their own keyboard for a writing system they are familiar with
- Programming with Unicode using tools such as JavaScript and Python
- Working together in groups for a certain tasks and improving their performance through collaboration
- Digital preservation of manuscripts through programming
- Digital preservation of manuscripts using existing online tools (like eScriptorium, Transkribus, OCR4All, etc.)
- Using cryptogram algorithms (based on the Shannon’s Information theory) to decipher unknown writing systems
- Creating an application (based off of a template) to transliterate between two writing systems in order to comprehend the challenges of such a task
Additionally, there are a couple of case studies of specific writing systems that I have created tools for, where together in the session we attempt to generate an engineering solution for a practical problem.
During the course, the students are required to complete and submit 3 tasks: a font or keyboard of a writing system that they aren’t familiar with, a presentation or group discussion on topics such as script preservation, revitalisation, etc., and the implementation of a project for which the scope is agreed upon during the course. I deliberately chose those types of tasks to develop a sense of wonder and orient the students on how they could best begin to perceive the vast world of writing systems. As part of their project planning activity, the students are tasked to draw inspiration from the “Scripts to Encode” list on the SEI website to determine which particular writing system they wish to work on. After a couple of rounds of discussions in bi-weekly sessions between the students and me, the scope of the project is agreed upon.
Student Projects
Here are few of the projects done by students during the course:
| Avoiuli – Orfeas Dialinos prepared a font and keyboard as part of the project submission and reports the following about the work involved and their challenges: This project addresses the digital marginalization of Avoiuli, an indigenous script from Pentecost Island, Vanuatu, developed by Viraleo Boborenvanua as part of the Raga language movement. The primary problem identified was a critical lack of digital standardization; no functional fonts or keyboard layouts existed, creating a significant barrier to the script’s survival in modern administrative and educational contexts. This absence is compounded by a global digital infrastructure that prioritizes Latin-based systems, effectively excluding unique writing systems like Avoiuli from the digital landscape. The implementation phase focused on translating the script’s unique single-stroke, sand-drawing-inspired morphology into a usable digital format. To achieve this, a custom typeface was developed using Calligraphr, where hand-drawn characters were digitized using an Android tablet and stylus to preserve their stylized, often symmetrical nature. Subsequently, a functional input method was engineered through Keyman, mapping the script’s characters to a keyboard layout compatible with both the Raga language and Bislama. Technical challenges during development highlighted the inherent complexity of indigenous script digitization. Although Avoiuli is traditionally written in a boustrophedon or bidirectional manner, I discovered through Keyman’s documentation that full bidirectional control resides with the operating system and application engines rather than the keyboard software itself. To manage this, the project provides manual Unicode markers and system-level instructions for users to toggle text direction. Furthermore, initial font renderings suffered from visual degradation, which was mitigated by employing AI-based upscaling to refine the clarity and detail of the glyphs. Significant discrepancies were noted regarding application compatibility, as certain software environments failed to recognize the custom font’s internal glyphs. Because Keyman only emits Unicode codepoints and does not force a specific font’s appearance across all interfaces, the script’s visual representation remains dependent on the target application’s rendering engine. Despite these limitations, the keyboard remains fully functional in environments such as Windows Notepad, providing an essential foundation for the Raga community to reclaim their linguistic space in the digital era. |
| Aztec pictograms – Lana Allan prepared a font and encoding procedure as part of the project submission and reports the following about the work involved and their challenges: As part of my master’s course, I was tasked with writing a mock Unicode proposal for a presently unencoded script. I chose Aztec Pictograms. I first familiarised myself with Alternative graphemics, Aztec writing system as a case study towards an integrated, digitalised model of non-typographic graphemics (2024) by Perri et al. This paper attempted to tackle much the same issue, and from reading the paper, the challenge of the task ahead of me became clear. Perri et al described Aztec Pictograms as a series of non-linear composite images, which is to say that the pictograms are not placed in a linear order such as the left-to-right word direction of English. By “composite”, we mean a single glyph is a combination piece of several other glyphs. In essence, each glyph has its own meaning, which can then be recombined into something new as though each glyph were a single syllable, and a larger glyph might be a word or a name. For me, this was especially challenging. I do not possess a background in linguistics in any sense. So, I sought an advantage. Emojis are pictograms that are presently encoded in Unicode. Specifically, Emojis with a zero-width joiner allow for the creation of composite glyphs as you type. For example, a cloud emoji joined with a face emoji results in a face in the clouds (😶🌫️). I believed I could utilise this as a framework for the encoding of Aztec glyphs and sought to test this by attempting to encode a single page of the Codex Mendoza. For this, I chose Folio 57r, a scene featuring pictograms describing childbirth and associated rituals. Using Inkscape, I created a single .svg file for every conceptual idea represented. I created a glyph for a baby, a basin, a basin with water, a water basin on a reed mat, a reed mat, water, a mother, a mother speaking, a midwife, footprints, and maize kernels, to name a few out of a total of thirty-three glyphs. Through some digital trickery, I was able to bring these full colour glyphs into Fontforge, assigning a code to each. Additionally, I laid out a system for combining these glyphs with a zero-width joiner. For example, any of the human characters could be combined with a speech scroll to create a version of that person speaking aloud. Getting this to work was an incredible challenge for a student with no budget, but I did manage to create a .ttx file for a full colour Aztec Pictogram font, as well as recreation of Folio 57r! |
| Other student projects included: – Tai Yo font and keyboard – Cretan hieroglyphs font and keyboard – Naasioi Otomaung font and website – Multi-calendrical system website – Sámi languages in Cyrillic script – Calligraphy Website – Greek Minuscules in Manuscript – Dizoleiñ ar Brezhoneg (AR app to learn Breton) – Transliteration bot – Numeral calculator system – Learning Old Persian gamified – Korean writing systems – Ancient Iranian Script Identifier |
The results of the projects have the quality that is on par with what one would consider a minimum viable product in industry. If a member of a community who needs digitisation were to pick most of the products like a font and/or keyboard, they should be usable for the most part. There are a couple of projects that did need some additional care before they could be used, such as image qualities used, or aesthetically coherent forms of writing, etc.; however, even in those scenarios, the overarching understanding of what was intended was met. Certainly some of the projects were attempting to bite more than what they could chew in such a short time, but the point of appreciation is opening up their minds to explore this avenue.
Final Thoughts
From the semesters when this course was conducted, I can report that the students are absolutely invested into experiencing and learning this new format of the exercise-based course about writing systems. Given that students come from different backgrounds and schools of thought with regard to their Masters’ programmes, it was clear to me that they were highly motivated, keen to know intricate details, and eager to toil away hours to achieve their targets.
Thus I can say with conviction that my course is putting a small piece of a framework in academia to enable enthusiastic learners take a guided dive into writing systems and then come to the surface with the utmost desire to strengthen bonds in societies through new digital means.
Thank you for giving me this wonderful opportunity to tell my story.
| Vyshantha Simha is working as an application developer at IBM Germany and pursuing doctoral studies in Digital Humanities at the University of Cologne on ontology of writing systems. He conducts summer semester course for university students where they build fonts, keyboards, transliteration websites and more. He has also worked on creating the “World Scripts Explorer” website. Learn more about his work here. |
