Making Electronic Communications Available to All

Deborah Anderson and Rick McGowan of the Unicode Consortium

Date: Wednesday, 16 March 2005
Time: 6:30pm - refreshments, 7:00pm - talk
Location: Hewlett Packard (see directions), Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room.
Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $10/year.

Topic:
Unicode provides the standard for the representation and processing of text electronically. As a result of Unicode and other standards built on it, it is possible today to type email, create web pages, and produce electronic documents in the writing systems used by many hundreds of the world's languages. However, over eighty scripts are not yet included in Unicode, meaning that many populations cannot communicate in their native script electronically. To remedy the situation, a project was established at UC Berkeley, the Script Encoding Initiative. It aims to help get into Unicode those ancient and modern scripts which are still not included. The project involves close collaboration with linguists, user communities, and other groups, and has received support from UNESCO and the NEH. The results of the effort will have an important impact on education, literacy, research, and other areas of communication, and will help open the Web—and electronic communication generally—to the world at large.

About the Speakers:
Deborah Anderson is project leader for the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley and a researcher in the Dept. of Linguistics. She is the representative to the Unicode Consortium for UC Berkeley and the Linguistic Society of America. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies and edits a publication for UCLA.

Rick McGowan is Vice President of the Unicode Consortium and a collaborator on the Script Encoding Initiative project.