ScriptKey: Prototyping for Language Justice
For languages that are not supported by Unicode, speakers are dramatically limited in their ability to communicate and preserve their language digitally. It requires a large community-driven push for an under-resourced script’s users to begin the long process of seeing their script adopted by Unicode—a process that requires records of the language in use, something to which endangered languages are especially likely to not have easy access.
Thus, we decided to work on creating a tool that allows for digital records of language used to be generated, as well as provide a day to day function for users who would like to communicate in their preferred scripts through digital means, when they previously would have had to resort to using another script or relying on calling or voice messages.
Our proposed tool focuses on allowing users to create messages in under-resourced scripts using image representations of characters and save them as images to be used elsewhere digitally. This allows script users to embed their script into their digital lives and, if they choose to begin the process of encoding, establish an archive of digital interactions to support the encoding process, image recognition, font creation, and more. This project was completed as a part of a team of 4, I focused on building the “typing” functionality.
Here is the repo
Here is the research paper
Here is the presentation
This project was part of the class GU4315: Multilingual Technologies and Language Diversity which I took in Spring 2021.
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