This workshop is part of the World History Center's "Globalizing Writing in the Digital Age" initiative.

Writing systems have been inscribed, policed, regulated in a variety of ways across time and space - from language academies and lexicographers, to typewriters and metal linecasters. In this talk, Dr. Anusha Hossain (Stanford University) and Dr. Keith M. Murphy (University of California, Irvine) present a series of case studies that highlight how different agents have shaped written language, drawing from existing literature in applied linguistics, STS, and media studies.  

They will then situate the Unicode Consortium within this constellation of agents, as a novel mediator with a new set of affordances and politics. Using examples from their own research, centered primarily on the Bangla language, they will demonstrate the ways in which writing systems are permitted to change today, and why scholars should pay heed.