This is a guest post by Helen Giunashvili | George Tsereteli Institute of Oriental Studies/Ilia State University  Introduction In the 16th-18th centuries, under conditions of the incorporation…

In the first post of this series, I introduced the notion of formularity in oral poetry along with a new linguistic approach that treats formulas as constructions of ordinary language. In this piece, ...

This is a guest post by Peichao Qin | University of Cambridge. Tired of struggling to find and type out complex oracle bone script characters? You’re not alone. For years, scholars and enthusiasts ali...

This is a follow-up to part one on the "Future of the Commons" conference published earlier this week. While that article focused on developments in AI for Indian languages, this one documents the sta...

With recent advancements in AI, including developments by Sarvam AI and Hanooman AI, creating a lot of hype around large language models (LLM) in Indian languages, it is time to reflect on what kind o...

It has been another busy and exciting year for The Digital Orientalist. Our 10th anniversary was a special occasion, marked by the introduction of several new features that have our enhanced our platf...

It has been another busy and exciting year for The Digital Orientalist. Our 10th anniversary was a special occasion, marked by the introduction of several new features that have our enhanced our platf...

EVENT: Bidirectional Text (Part 1): The Basics of Bidi DATE: June 25, 2024 Chapters 0:00 Introductory Slide 1:45 Session begins 3:07 Basics of Bidi Presentation 39:05 Presentation Summary 40:54 Further Reading/Resource Links 42:07 Q & A DESCRIPTION: A number of scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu, write their letters horizontally on a page or screen, running right to left. A complication for these scripts is that other characters, such as digits, flow left-to-right, and can occur on the same line, or even alongside other left-to-right text, such as Latin. Text that handles both right-to-left and left-to-right text is called “bidirectional” text (“bidi” in short). How to handle bidi text on browsers and in other software is challenging for both general users and implementers. This webinar will describe the basics with examples. It will be followed by a live question-and-answer period. A more in-depth question and answer session will take place August 13, 2024. PRESENTERS: Richard Ishida served as the Internationalization Lead for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for 20 years. Since the 1990s, Richard has been on a never-ending crusade to educate the world's programmers to a wide variety of internationally important issues. He has been a valued contributor to the Unicode standard as a member of the Unicode Editorial Committee, as well as the Unicode Script Encoding Working Group. Richard received a Unicode Bulldog award in recognition for his work. Roozbeh Pournader is an internationalization engineer who has been contributing to the Unicode Standard since 1999. He started his internationalization career in Iran in 1994 when he was a high school student. After moving to the United States, he has worked at companies such as Google and WhatsApp. He has received a Unicode Bulldog award for his contributions to Unicode and CLDR’s support for complex scripts and is Vice Chair of the Unicode Script Encoding Working Group. UNICODE LINKS Technical Quick Start Guide: https://home.unicode.org/technical-quick-start-guide/ Become a Unicode Member: https://home.unicode.org/membership/membership-levels/ Support Unicode: https://home.unicode.org/support-unicode/ Unicode Website: https://home.unicode.org

This event is the second of a three-part series on bidirectional text (“bidi”). Bidi is a feature of certain scripts – such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu – that write their letters horizontally right-to...