Digital Approaches to Understanding Dongba Pictographs

The present study describes the implementation of several digital tools developed to assist the grammatological studies on the Dongba pictographic writing system. The entries in the Dictionary of Moso Hieroglyphs have been thoroughly scrutinized and reorganized according to their major semantic components. These provide a foundation for the construction of an online database of the Dongba pictographic script, with the web platform and a character set of a private use area font. The major theoretical frameworks and terminologies applied to study the Dongba script are reviewed, including the traditional Chinese approach and the IDS and IDC defined by the Unicode Consortium. The radicals can be divided into two categories: basic pictographs and complex pictographs—fusion units (with additional components attached to the corresponding basic pictographs). Based on these dimensions, a network analysis approach is introduced for grammatological research purposes. The algorithms in network analysis can be utilized for assessing the stage of development of the writing system. As a searchable database, it provides the possibility of a statistic approach to this not-yet-Unicode script and facilitates the visualization of glyph clusters sharing common components and a close analysis of the nature of the single elements in each glyph.