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Im forwarding this along because it looks like an interesting project. The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia) has been very active in the transcription and encoding for digital purposes various scripts, but this is the first project I have seen in cooperation with a museum. The Tropenmuseum is a Dutch museum dedicated to cultures found in tropical areas of the world. <br><br>I have promoted working with Wikimedia before for linguists and I still think it is a great opportunity for linguists, especially those interested in the preservation/promotion of endangered languages, open culture and how technology is changing culture, including academia. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, just entered into an agreement with the British government to develop ways to make publicly funded research easily available to the public under free licenses.<br><br>Leigh<br><br><div><div id="SkyDrivePlaceholder"></div><hr id="stopSpelling">From: gerard.meijssen@gmail.com<br>Date: Wed, 9 May 2012 10:47:21 +0200<br>To: cultural-partners@wikimedia.ch<br>CC: alolita.sharma@gmail.com; F.Meijer@kit.nl<br>Subject: [cultural-partners] Text in the Batak script<br><br>Hoi,<div>Many collections have material that is in other languages than the language of the land and often not even in the script that people are familiar with. For some languages there are departments in universities to keep the knowledge of a language alive. This is very much to ensure that we keep an understanding of the development of our culture.</div>
<div><br></div><div>For some languages there is no attention. For some languages there is not even a way to enter texts as text in the original script on modern computers. Yet these materials can be found in archives and museums. Some of the texts shed a light on how history developed and shows how much history is written by the victor. For us Wikimedians, access to materials like these and being able to give them their place is important. Without it we cannot achieve sharing in the sum of all knowledge.. even in English.</div>
<div><br></div><div>For the Batak scripts, there are several Batak languages, we are starting a GLAM project that has two objectives:</div><div><ul><li>making texts in Batak currently in archives and museums available for transcription</li>
<li>creating a Unicode font and an input method that allows for the writing of the Batak languages</li></ul><div>We made a choice for the Batak script and languages because it did not have a Unicode font yet and because the Tropenmuseum has some really relevant objects. Obviously there are other languages and scripts equally deserving. What it takes is a font and a scan or photo of the objects.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The project will be in cooperation with the Tropenmuseum. The font and input method will become available in all the Wikis that have support for the MediaWiki extensions Narayam and WebFonts. Wikisource is one of them. When your project has a need for this and reached a consensus about this, you can request these extensions to be enabled in Bugzilla.</div>
</div><div>Thanks,</div><div> Gerard</div><div><br></div><div>PS I will be blogging about this project as things develop</div>
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