Main web page of the glyph web site. Credit: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, PSL SCRIPTA
A workforce of cognitive scientists lead by Dr. Yoolim Kim (Korea Institute at Harvard and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History) and Dr. Olivier Morin (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and PSL University, Paris) have simply launched a free gaming applet. The sport, known as “glyph”, permits gamers to compete with one another to type letter shapes from numerous writing techniques into classes of their very own creation. The most unique and informative classifications win additional factors.
Dr. Kim explains “Science is sweet at sorting issues into classifications. Chemists have the desk of parts, biologists have the system of species—there are guidelines to type even Pokémon! But there isn’t any such factor for letters. For some writing, sure, however not for all of the letters on this planet.”
The subject of visible psychology, or the examine of how issues we see have an effect on the methods we expect, presently lacks a vocabulary for describing letter shapes. So far, letters have principally been studied from the viewpoint of linguistics, and only some research have checked out their shapes and visible properties with massive datasets reflecting the range of the world’s scripts. The workforce hopes the glyph applet will result in the emergence of a standard commonplace that may unify the examine of writing system throughout linguistics and imaginative and prescient science.
The first query they are going to try and reply with this information considerations the distinctiveness of letters: how do letters in a script handle to be totally different sufficient from each other with out being too troublesome to course of.
Playing to type the letters of the Nabatean script: a display seize from the applet. Credit: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, PSL SCRIPTA
A visible grammar of letter shapes
Crowdsourcing—asking a lot of gamers to contribute to a venture—will permit researchers to acquire a typology of letter shapes with reproducible and clear classification guidelines. The analysis workforce hopes to construct a grammar of letter shapes, attaining for the form of writing what linguists have accomplished for the sounds of language.
“A typology for letters will actually open the doorways into analysis on writing and writing techniques,” says Kim. “But as a substitute of asking specialists to create one, we’re asking the general public for assist.”
The sport works by presenting gamers with a set of characters from one of many 45 written languages included in glyph. Players faucet on the characters to create a gaggle based mostly on their visible similarities after which create guidelines that describe the similarities of the group. The workforce will then run machine studying instruments on the members’ contributions to determine probably the most dependable and informative guidelines.
Rare African script gives clues to the evolution of writing
More info:
Scientific venture description on the Open Science Framework: osf.io/j9zhn/
Provided by
Max Planck Society
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An on-line sport to crowdsource the science of letter shapes (2022, February 17)
retrieved 17 February 2022
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