In a previous post, “Minding Mende”, I introduced the notebooks of Bokari Kanneh that had been digitized, and were awaiting … Continue reading Progress in the transcription of a Mende primary source

As I write this, it is the day before George Floyd’s funeral in Houston. It is hard to understate the … Continue reading Lifting up Black voices

Progress toward understanding the Meroitic script has been well underway since the foundational work of Francis Llewellyn Griffith, published in … Continue reading The role of digital tools in relation to understanding Meroitic

The study of Ajami texts, those using the Arabic script and various modifications and extensions of it to represent languages … Continue reading Learning about West African Ajami

The digital needs for the Coptic script are becoming better served in recent years, with the introduction of a standard … Continue reading Keeping up with Coptic

The prospects for cataloging materials in Ge’ez, Amharic, Tigre, and Tigrinya have greatly improved since the introduction of a system … Continue reading Cataloging Ethiopian Materials

In 1961, El Hadji Assane Faye was inspired by listening to a radio speech by the president of newly independent … Continue reading Gearing up for Garay

I have never been to Liberia.  I tried to get there once, in 2009, for the Liberian Studies Association conference … Continue reading Encountering the Vai script

In previous posts I have discussed the process of encoding West African scripts into the Unicode standard.  The question that … Continue reading Of browsers, keyboards, and fonts, with a focus on certain West African scripts