School Seminar – Mark-Jan Nederhof , “The ‘insertion’ control characters for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text”
You are warmly invited to the next School seminar:
📅 Thursday 05/02/2026
🕰️ 10:00-11:00
📍 JC 1.33A
Speaker: Mark-Jan Nederhof
Title: The ‘insertion’ control characters for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text
Abstract: Egyptian hieroglyphic writing differs from most other writing systems and poses unique challenges for representation in machine-readable form. It took until 2009 for Unicode to adopt a basic list of hieroglyphs, and it took another 10 years for the first control characters to be adopted that are needed to format those hieroglyphs into running text. Two open-source implementations of those control characters in general-purpose programming languages rely on concepts from image processing and computational geometry. An open font was released that contains the hieroglyphs.
Bio: Mark-Jan Nederhof has been in the School since 2006. His main research area is computational linguistics, with emphasis on syntactic analysis and processing of ancient texts.
We hope you can join us!