Thomas Milo

Script grammar: a linguistic approach to digitising Islamic script

November 5, Saturday 16:00 – Sakıp Sabancı Museum

To create the technology that lies at the basis of Mushaf Muscat, both as a website and as a book, a new, complementary approach was developed to cover those aspects of Arabic script that are crucial and yet not often documented. The approach is analogous to the one followed in the development of typography for Western scripts like Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, but also for Chinese and Indian script. In this approach a representative variety of top-quality handwriting has to be reproduced as accurately as possible.

Bio

Thomas Milo - linguist (Slavic, Turkic, Arabic) - has been working since the 1980s on fundamental digital humanities, linking scholarship and computer technology, digitising traditional Islamic scripts and contributing to Cyrillic and Arabic text encoding. He published many articles on the structure and history of Arabic script, notably on the scientific analysis of classical Arabic scripts which led to the introduction of the concept of script grammar. Distinctions: Unicode Bulldog Award 2000 for fundamental contributions to digital text encoding - Dr Peter Karow Award 2003 for exceptional and innovative contributions to the development of digital type and typography related technology.