Digital Humanities Foundation
As the world becomes more and more digital, we are faced with a number of new problems that demand fundamentally different approaches to solving them. The Digital Humanities Foundation (DHF) is a non-profit setup in The Netherlands to address some of these evolving issues.
First on the agenda of the DHF is the unequal treatment of non-Western scripts in the digital environment. Script is the common element that connects the past, the present and the future of civilisations. All things digital overwhelmingly favour English speakers and others who use the Latin script. Between the thousands of languages and hundreds of scripts belonging to other writing systems, there is quite a bit of humanity that is excluded from utilising the digital to its full potential. Users of abjad scripts like Arabic and abugida scripts like the Indic family are forced to adapt to English or risk being left behind with none of the benefits of the digital revolution. This new digital divide threatens the continuity of non-Western cultures and civilizations.
To address this issue, the DHF is assembling an expert team comprised of linguists, designers, culturalists, economists and technologists, all focused on the same goal – to develop technology that is designed from the ground-up to support non-alphabetic writing systems.
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