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WI·CON · Series · Dossiers

Conservation Files

A script does not simply die or survive — it is kept, dropped, mourned, and sometimes deliberately brought back. This series documents revival as work: who did it, by what means, and whether it took.

7chapters declared 0published 7forthcoming 1880s → todayloss to revival

Chapter grammar — every file follows the same skeleton

  1. The Loss
  2. The Trigger
  3. The Method
  4. The Community
  5. The Status

Each file records how the script declined, what sparked the revival, the mechanism (a committee, a school, a font, one person), who carried it, and how alive it is now — recorded honestly, not cheered.

01 A Standard for the AmazighTifinagh — an ancient script kept alive by the Tuareg, standardised by Morocco's IRCAM in 2003 and put on road signs. Room → 02 𐒰 Written As ItselfOsage — Herman Mongrain Lookout builds a new alphabet in the 2000s to reclaim a language from ambiguous Latin spelling. Room → 03 𛅰 The Women's ScriptNüshu — a syllabary made and used by women in Hunan, revived from near-extinction after its last natural inheritor died. Room → 04 א Bringing a Language HomeHebrew — a script that never died attached to a spoken language that did, then was deliberately brought back to daily life. Room → 05 Sequoyah's HeirsCherokee — from a 19th-century literacy boom to today's classroom and keyboard revitalisation of an endangered language. Room →
06 B Baybayin ReturnsThe Philippines — a pre-colonial Brahmic script revived by artists, tattooists and legislators as a mark of identity. Forthcoming
07 § What Revival CostsClosing file — when revival is heritage vs. living use, who gets to decide a script is ‘saved’, and the museum's own role. Forthcoming

Toward the book

This series is declared complete at seven files. On completion it moves to Naisu Press as a volume in the institute's imprint — same chapter grammar, same specimens, print-first typesetting via the Paged.js pipeline. Chapters published here remain open access; the book is the collected, revised edition.

The Register New acquisitions and new chapters — once a month, nothing else.