The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently announced their grants for 2020 to support 188 humanities projects across the United States. The Unicode Consortium's project to make Maya texts accessible to both expert and non-expert user communities through creating an annotated digital archive is one of the funded projects. This project will be led by principal investigator, Gabrielle Vail.

The NEH announcement included mention of the grant to the Unicode Consortium: "Another grant will augment the international Unicode computer text encoding standards to digitally render additional historical and modern scripts, including Mayan ... hieroglyphs."

Thousands of texts written in a hieroglyphic script by prehispanic Maya cultures have been preserved throughout the Maya lowlands, in museums, and in private collections. Various media were used, including painting, carving, and incising. Texts can be found on large-scale stone monuments, the walls of buildings, painted polychrome vessels, codices made from fig-bark paper, and small objects made from stone, bone, and wood. The project will focus on building a digital archive to include texts from Classic period monumental sites. These Classic period texts are most often of a dynastic or political nature.

The Unicode Maya project will advance research on Classic period sites circa 250-900 CE (Common Era) to determine the sign repertoire or character list, a list of quadrats (specific configurations that can be arranged and combined to form a glyphic cartouche or block), a glossary of attested terms from the Classic period, a lexicon mapping of Classic period terms to the Colonial period and modern Mayan dictionaries, and finally, the creation of OpenType fonts.

About the Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards.

The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations, many in the computer and information processing industry. Members include: Adobe, Apple, Emojipedia, Facebook, Google, Government of Bangladesh, Government of Tamil Nadu, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Monotype Imaging, Netflix, Sultanate of Oman MARA, Oracle, SAP, Tamil Virtual University, The University of California (Berkeley), plus well over a hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual members. For a complete member list go to https://home.unicode.org/membership/members/.

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The Adopt-a-Character Program is awarding the third in a series of grants to support the encoding of Maya hieroglyphs and their study by researchers. This grant is a continuation of earlier AAC-funded efforts to incorporate information from Maya codices into a multidimensional database. The work in 2019 will focus on hieroglyphs inscribed on monuments, and will fund work to advance the understanding of the corpus of inscriptional hieroglyphs by including this dataset in the multidimensional database developed for the Maya script. This work will further understanding of an appropriate encoding model for these complex hieroglyphs and will also provide support for new research work on the Maya script through the updated database.

The work will be led by Dr. Gabrielle Vail (Research Labs of Archaeology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Anthropology Program, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg) under the direction of Dr. Deborah Anderson (SEI, UC Berkeley).

The image included in this announcement is text from a lintel from the Maya site of Yaxchilan, Mexico. Photo by Gabrielle Vail.

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The Advent of Mayan Script Encoding: Mapping the Last Frontiers of Mayan Hieroglyphic Decipherment

Carlos Pallan Gayol
Archaeologist & Epigrapher, Dept. of Old American Studies & Ethnology, University of Bonn

Mayan hieroglyphs rank among the most visually complex writing systems ever created. Deciphering them has entailed a 200+ year scholarly quest, but this task is not yet completed and posits an inviting challenge for applying new tools from the information-age, culminating in the encoding of the Mayan script. Join us Tuesday morning, September 11th, as this keynote highlights the latest milestones attained in this pursuit by the NcodeX Project, where Carlos Pallan collaborates with Dr. Deborah Anderson, Researcher, Dept. of Linguistics, UC Berkeley, the Script Encoding Initiative and members of the Unicode advisory board. Stemming from research funded by Unicode’s Adopt-a-Character Program, it has been possible to produce new database tools and advanced functionalities, capable of mapping and analyzing all the textual contents of the extant Mayan books or Codices by relying on a novel catalog of Mayan signs with assigned code points.

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For over 27 years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. Join us in Santa Clara to promote your ideas and experiences working with natural languages, multicultural user interfaces, producing and supporting multinational and multilingual products, linguistic algorithms, applying internationalization across mobile and social media platforms, or advancements in relevant standards.

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Adopt-a-Character

The first grant of funds from Unicode’s Adopt-a-Character program has been awarded to UC Berkeley’s Script Encoding Initiative (SEI), for the first two phases of a project to include Mayan hieroglyphs as Unicode characters.

Thanks go to our sponsors for providing funds to support this grant. Adopting a character helps the Unicode Consortium in its goal to support the world’s languages.

Mayan hieroglyphs were used from 250 BCE until the 1500s. Mayan textual records include historical, literary, religious, and mythological information, as well as a sophisticated mathematical system on par with that of the Romans. Mayan astronomical records continue to capture the attention of astronomers today. Including Mayan hieroglyphs as Unicode characters will allow them to be used on computers around the world. See more about Mayan.

Mayan is a complex script, requiring special support in layout and presentation. The first phase is a catalog and analysis of the Dresden codex, resulting in a draft set of Unicode atomic signs and composition mechanisms needed for full Mayan text. The second phase is based on that analysis: preparation of a proposal for layout and presentation mechanisms in Unicode text, using those atomic elements. These two phases are to be completed in 2017.