Ahead of the “Unicode and the Humanities Conference,” which will be held at Pitt in February 2-3, 2024, the Center is hosting a series of talks and workshops that introduce students and faculty to the history of the role of computers in globalizing world scripts, which may be the most profound change to the technology of written communication since the printing press. These events will be led by Anushah Hossain (Stanford University) and Keith M. Murphy (University of California, Irvine). View the schedule of events below.
October 2, 10:00-11:30 AM: "The Shape of Unicode," an introduction to the many meanings of Unicode. 3703 Posvar Hall. Join us for a light lunch after the event.
October 2, 2:00-4:00 PM: "Decoding the Unicode Standard," a workshop on using Unicode’s digital archives. 4130 Posvar Hall.
October 3, 11:00-12:30 PM: "The New Language Planners," a talk on the Unicode Consortium’s language politics. 3703 Posvar Hall.
Anushah Hossain is a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab (2022-2023). Her research examines the histories and values embedded in the multilingual internet. She does so by studying language technologies – the digital standards and code – that make it possible to send and receive non-Latin text online, and the communities that design them. Her work brings internet studies into conversation with sociolinguistics and histories of decolonization, contending with such issues as the evolving language politics of the digital age and the impact of postcolonial aspirations on internet infrastructure.
Keith M. Murphy is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on language and design, and he’s currently writing a book on the people who care for writing systems and writing technologies.