:text equivalent:
Emoticons from Clubplanet bulletin board using vBulletin software
David Golumbia
Assistant Professor
Media Studies Program and Department of English
University of Virginia
February, 2004
Overview
eGlyph is a project that fuses a long-underexamined feature of written language with some of the latest features of computer technology. eGlyph explores the development of variable digital linguistic forms that do not, necessarily, rely on a primary written language. Instead, conceptual schemes derived from a range of glyphic communication systems, especially those found in historical glyphic writings systems such as Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, are provided in a "toolkit" fashion allowing users to assemble symbolic elements in a variety of ways. eGlyph builds on the prevalence of graphic communication systems in the modern computing environment, especially the "emoticon" systems found increasingly in instant messaging clients, chat, email, and community applications. The goal of eGlyph is to develop a general underlying strategy for developing and deploying glyphic communication systems, and to investigate how these systems might interface with various schemes for multilingual computing, especially Unicode.
Background
Glyphic writing constitutes one of the least-understood and most potentially fecund areas for research in the history of human language. Many of the world's written languages either feature or at one time featured written symbols that have been variously termed hieroglyphic, logographic, pictographic, and ideographic among other names. In some cases demarcation among these terms is possible, but in others it is not. Although it is commonly thought that glyphic writing is "primitive" in comparison to alphabetic (phonetic) writing, on many recent accounts such value judgments seem suspect at best. Like all other technologies of writing, glyphs developed around the world on at least a few separate occasions, with both wide variance and striking similarity among glyphic forms. Among the most familiar examples are the hieroglyphs of Egypt and those of the Maya in Central America; but no less important for this project are the so-called pictographic elements in modern Mandarin script and their exporation and translation in scripts such as those associated with Japanase and Korean, and also less familiar glyphic scripts such as those of the Polynesian islands and premodern societies in the Near East and in Asia.
Fundamental to each of these systems is what appears on the surface to be a rebus-like interpretation of symbols according to which words are invoked according to sound-alike pictures. On this view, an English glyph representing the English word be could be represented by a glyph of a bee.
Such writing is often thought to be ineffecient because of obvious built-in ambiguities; on the surface it is not clear how to represent, for example, whether one means a literal bee or the word be. (Of course glyphic systems usually include means for distinguishing between these instances.) However, this sort of ambiguity can be seen as a potential feature in glyphic writing that could be exploited specifically for natural-language purposes.
As has long been noted in the literature on computational linguistics, it is the systematic (and anti-systematic) ambiguities in natural language that computers seem to have an especially difficult time managing. This is particularly true of the productive side of natural language, in that speakers typically make use of ambiguity in language in a widespread manner, frustrating attempts to provide solid dictionaries for natural-language words and phrases such that these entries match real-world uses. Among the most interesting scholarly ironies is that the compositional view of lexical entries has long been discredited among even the most-hard core linguistic philosophers (famously in Fodor 196x).
The aim of the eGlyph project is to investigate and to map in detail the semantic mechanisms implied by the various existing glyphic communication systems, including those that have allowed rampant reinterpretation of entire systems of meaning (famously in the Japanese reinterpretation of Mandarin characters, the Sumerian reinterpretation of Cuneiform, and even various historical reinterpretations of Egyptian hieroglphys.
Another critical observation informing this project is that graphics and glyphs already function with some efficiency in the contemporary computing environment. This is not merely true of certain powerful icons widely used among high-profile websites and software applications, but also
Emoticons
emoticons are among the most interesting....
| SOME EMOTICONS | ||||||
| GRAPHIC EMOTICON :text equivalent: |
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Emoticons from Clubplanet bulletin board using vBulletin software |
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Emoticons from an instance of commercial bulletin board program that rely on semantic interpretations of natural language strings that correspond to file names.
Verbal Glyphs
Glyphs can be used to represent verbs and concepts rather than purely sounds or nouns. For example, in the Maya glyphs we find generalized verb and phrase structure glyphs:
| VERBAL GLYPHS | |
MAYAN verbal reading |
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Mayan verbal glyphs from Mayan Syllabary and Glyphs at Halfmoon.org |
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Project Components
Existing software for creating non-Roman scripts is surprisingly sparse. Efforts to manage the complexities of ordering in scripts such as Arabic and South Asian scripts make font development difficult, even where proposed standards exist, and often interact poorly with built-in aspects of the computer such as sorting, storage and ordering, when these depend on alphanumeric ordering presumptions.
This project does not attempt, then, to build a tool like the SIL's Graphite that would directly enable the true rendering of existing glyphic systems. Rather it explores a general architecture that is more directly graphical in nature, and yet attempts to map graphical/semantic representations with multiple and/or "fuzzy" conceptual objects, allowing these concepts to be represented via whatever language the user brings to the computer. The goal of the project in this sense is to describe an architecture that allows tools and glyphs to be assembled and deployed.
Research agenda
Outcomes
The point of the eGlyph project is to develop a set of tools and usable glyphs and to introduce these to target audiences with the intent of developing user bases. Several intermediate research components will be developed during the project which may lead to or mesh with other academic outcomes, but for the purposes of eGlyph the deployment of one or more glyphic representation/interpretation systems is of key importance.
Secondary outcomes that are anticipated for the project include:
References
Online Resources
Last updated February 10, 2004 .