Unicode, Text Encoding, and I18n Working Group, UC Berkeley

For further information, contact <dwanders(at)berkeley(dot)edu> or Richard Cook at <rscook(at)berkeley(dot)edu>.

2005–2006 Events

Monday, November 28–Friday, December 2. 9 a.m.–5 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall. Meeting of the Ideographic Rapporteur Group #25, a subgroup of the International Organization for Standardization devoted to computer issues for CJK. A special session on "Old Hanzi" will be held. To observe this meeting, please contact D. Anderson or R. Cook at the email addresses above in advance of the meeting. Co-sponsored by the Dept. of Linguistics, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the East Asian Studies Library, the Institute of East Asian Studies, and the Unicode Consortium.

2004–2005 Events

Friday, September 24. 12 noon, 1229 Dwinelle Hall. Talk by Cathy Wissink, Chair, Technical Committee L2 “Codes and Character Sets” subcommittee of the National Committee for Information Technology Standards, and Program Manager, Microsoft, “The challenge of developing technology for all the world's languages: Unicode, Windows, and tools development.”

Of related interest: Thursday and Friday, November 4-5. Advanced session on Text Encoding Initiative is planned.

Note: A tutorial on archiving linguistic data and a panel on Unicode have been proposed for the Linguistics Society of America meeting in January 2005. Please see the LSA website <http://www.lsadc.org/> for details.

Friday, February 25. 2 p.m. 1229 Dwinelle Hall. Talk by Lee Collins, Manager, Apple Computer OS Engineering Asia, “Trends in Font and Language Support on OS X” (co-sponsored with BiFoCAL).

Wednesday, March 30. 12 noon, 46 Dwinelle Hall. Tutorial by Jeff Good, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Dept. of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, on “Data,  Standards, and Services: Towards a General Model for Linguistic Databases” (co-sponsored with BiFoCAL).

Friday, April 29. 2 p.m., 46 Dwinelle Hall. Talk by Andrew Garrett, Assoc. Prof., Dept. of Linguistics, UC Berkeley, “Philology, Lexical Structure, and Regular Expressions:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love XML”

2003–2004 Events

Friday, September 26. 12 noon, 1229 Dwinelle Hall. Organizational meeting, held in conjunction with Berkeley Language Center and the Berkeley Initiative for Computer-Assisted Linguistics (BIFoCAL).

Monday, February 23. 10 a.m. – 2 p.m., B21 Dwinelle (Language Lab). Talk on “Perl for Linguists: Why Programming and Why Perl?,” followed by a tutorial for students and faculty, for both beginning and advanced users by Mike Hammond (Professor of Linguistics, University of Arizona, and author of Programming for Linguists: Perl for Language Researchers).

Friday, April 23. 12 noon, 1229 Dwinelle Hall. Kamal Mansour (Manager of Non-Latin Products, Agfa-Monotype) will speak on “Unicode and Fonts.”

2003 Events

Thursday, January 30. Thomas Amsler, Programmer, UC Davis, “OpenRCT: A Collaborative Multimedia Tool for Language Teaching and Linguistic Research (and other fields),” 4 p.m., 33 Dwinelle Hall (co-sponsored with the Berkeley Language Center and the Berkeley Initiative for Computer-Assisted  Linguistics [BIFoCAL]).

Monday, March 3. Dr. Murray Sargent, Senior Software Design Engineer (Microsoft), Member of MathML 2.0 Working Group and Member of the Unicode Technical Committee, “Math Documents on the Web,” 12 noon, 1015 Evans Hall (co-sponsored with the Math Department). Abstract:

Unicode now has all the standard math characters used in science and  engineering. MathML is a markup language able to express many  mathematical constructs in both presentation and content-oriented ways.  The combination provides a foundation for math documents on the web, both for display and for computation. This talk describes these  technologies and how they can be used with current web tools and TeX.

Monday, March 10. Tim Finney, Text Encoding Specialist, Religion and Technology Center, “From Egyptian Rubbish Heaps to your Computer Screen: Bringing papyri to a display device near you!” 5 p.m., Stone Seminar Room, Bancroft Library (co-sponsored with the Bancroft Library and the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri). Abstract:

This talk will discuss constructing digital libraries of the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri and Oxford's new Corpus of Literary Papyri, which will contain papyri from Oxyrhynchus and Herculaneum.

Tuesday, April 29. Anthony Aristar, Wayne State and LinguistList moderator, “Language Codes and Language Families: Building a Dynamic Internet Resource for Linguistics,” 12 noon, 3401 Dwinelle Hall (co-sponsored with the Berkeley Language Center and the Berkeley Initiative for Computer-Assisted  Linguistics [BIFoCAL]). Abstract:

This talk will discuss the creation of a dynamic internet resource for linguistics, which has been developed and is accessible on the LINGUIST List website (<http://www.linguistlist.org/forms/langs/find-a-language-or-family.html>). The difficulty in building linguistic resources is due, in part, to the fact that many languages are known by multiple names (i.e., Hmong Njua is also known as Chuanqiandian Miao, Chuanchientien Miao, Sichuan-Guizhou-Yunnan Hmong, Tak Miao, Meo, Miao, Western Miao and Western Hmong), and this makes database searches difficult. For automated information retrieval, language names must thus be replaced by precise codes. The most nearly complete and consistent system is that of the Ethnologue (www.ethnologue.com). But the Ethnologue system categorizes languages by family, so language classification is not a major focus - and there is no way to categorize data by family or to indicate varying views of genetic relationships. LINGUIST will provide input on ancient, extinct, and artificial languages to complement the language set of Ethnologue and has devised a coding system for language families which incorporates genetic information into its syntax. Both LINGUIST and Ethnologue have agreed to merge their codes into a single code-set. This presentation will discuss a language tag initiative underway by LINGUIST and Ethnologue and touch on how language trees are generated on the LINGUIST webpage.