casey.html

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title: Christian Casey
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	<h3>Abstract: Digital Demotic: Opportunities and Challenges</h3>
	<p><em>By <a href="https://brown.academia.edu/ChristianCasey">Christian Casey</a>, Brown University</em><br /></p>
<p>American Oriental Society Meeting 2017<br />
Friday March 17th afternoon - ANE II, Bunker Hill Room<br />
Omni Hotel, California Plaza, 251 South Olive Street, Los Angeles</p>
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	<p>One of the biggest hurdles to the future of language studies in Egyptology is the difficulty of encoding Egyptian texts. However, ongoing work on Unicode support for Egyptian hieroglyphs promises to eliminate that format’s shortcomings and offer a quasi-universal standard for Egyptian.</p><p>
The study of Demotic texts faces an even bigger problem: no encoding exists whatsoever. It may seem obvious to suggest a Unicode encoding for Demotic to compliment the latest developments in the encoding of Egyptian, but this is easier said than done. Despite its similarity and deep relationship to the Hieroglyphic and Hieratic scripts, Demotic presents many unique challenges to anyone attempting to codify it. As a result, an encoding of Demotic must gracefully navigate many serious pitfalls, such as the need to be useful to those who specialize in the study of palaeography and the evolution of writing, while serving primarily to represent the script in standardized manner so that data can be organized and searched. </p><p>
The best way to design an encoding for Demotic is to determine an ideal use case for such an encoding. Seeing that project through to completion serves two complementary purposes at once: it creates an opportunity to develop an encoding and offers a valuable tool for researchers, which could not exist without that encoding. A database of Demotic prosopography, which would enable non-specialists to search for Egyptian names to learn about their lives and familial connections, would be one such ideal use case. Not only would this project close a major gap in the available
research tools, it would also push the demands of script encoding to their limit by drawing from the entire history and repertoire of the Demotic script. This project will strive to provide value to researchers in a variety of specializations within Egyptology, so feedback from the academic community is essential to its success at all stages of the development process.
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