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UNESCO WSIS Action Directory
How UNESCO is implementing the WSIS Action Plan |
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Home: Cultural and Linguistic Diversity, Local Content
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| Go to the Action Plan Chapter on Cultural and Linguistic Diversity, Local Content | text only |
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Project funding of the capital, training and 1st year?s operating costs for the transfer of Samoan television programs to the Internet.
The project is aimed to bolster the Samoan language and culture, both in Samoa and to Samoans abroad. It is also aimed to increase Samoan?s IT literacy
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The Digital Silk Roads Initiative Framework is an international collaborative framework functioning in interdisciplinary domains of activities with a far-reaching mandate to promote effective digital storage, restoration and exchanges of cultural heritage residing in the Silk Roads region that aims to enhance international cooperation in building Digital Silk Roads, underlining the deep interaction among cultures and civilizations which took place throughout history, thus highlighting cultural diversity in the region concerned
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Preserving indigenous peoples? cultural resources by fostering access to ICT, thus contributing to narrowing the digital divide is the aim of a project entitled "ICTs for Intercultural Dialogue: Developing communication capacities of indigenous peoples (ICT4ID)", which UNESCO has recently launched as the direct result of the International Forum on Local Cultural Expression and Communication held in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic on 3-6 November 2003.
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UNESCO, together with the Naledi3d Factory of South Africa hosted a workshop in Pretoria, during the week of 28 November 2005, with the purpose to take the interactive-3d Learning Object concept one step further and to transfer skills in the translation of these objects to other local languages.
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?A Society of Virtual Literatures? (Helsinki, 20/21 May 2005) is an International conference on the Internet as new space for the dissemination and promotion of literary translation. Literary translation is an invaluable tool for linguistic and cultural diversification within the international book market. But without joint support and promotion measures, literary translation runs the risk of serving the expansion of limited number tongues and literary expressions. To provide this kind of support, there are today in the world some one hundred public and private organisations. The international conference ?A Society of Virtual Literatures? will gather some forty experts and managers of support programmes to analyse and measure how the Internet is changing their work, and where.
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UNESCO's programme in support of creativity and innovation in local content production in radio, television and new media
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UNESCO organized a three-day expert meeting on "Cultural Diversity in Knowledge Societies" in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation, from 17 to 19 May 2005. The event took place in the framework of the conference "UNESCO between the two phases of the World Summit on the Information Society" organized by the Russian authorities.
The meeting was one of UNESCO?s thematic meetings in preparation for the second meeting of the World Summit on the Information Society (Tunis, Tunisia, 16-18 November 2005).
The purpose of this meeting was to measure sustainability of cultural diversity through the opportunities offered by ICT for future knowledge societies.
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The project consist in developing a Unicode standard for N'ko a script used by the Manden people of West Africa, to the international character encoding standards Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646. The project is being conducted by the University of California Berkeley's Script Encoding Initiative with the support of UNESCO's Initiative B@bel.
Once included in the standard and after a standardized font is developed, users will be able to use N'ko in email, on webpages, in blogs, or on other electronic documents. Currently, electronic text communication in the N'ko script is very difficult, impeding publication of newspapers, magazines, school texts and other books. For a population of 20 million, this presents a significant barrier to literacy efforts.
With the assistance of UNESCO's Initiative B@bel, a Unicode script proposal for N'ko was written by Irish script-expert Michael Everson, and has been approved for balloting by the relevant International Organization for Standardization working group. N'ko is on the path for inclusion in the next full release of Unicode (5.0). As part of stage two of the project, a font will be created and locale information identified.
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To commemorate the 1600th anniversary of the creation of the Armenian alphabet, UNESCO, through its project Initiative B@bel, and the Matenadaran Institute in Yerevan have launched a project to enhance access to information in the digital environment for the Armenian language.
The project will develop a Unicode compatible font to overcome some current constraints in the use of the Armenian language in fields such as modern print and digital publishing.
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As no adequate ICT tools exist to process and publish texts in Mongolian script, the National University of Mongolia joined efforts with the Mongolian University of Science and Technology to implement the project promoting the use of the traditional Mongolian script by text processing and web publishing tools.
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UNESCO supported standardization process for Ethiopic scripts as a precondition for local content development in languages in Ethiopia like Tigrina, Afar, Amharic and others (Part of UNESCO?s Initiative B@bel with support of UNECA and the Ministry of Capacity Building)
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Improved data transfer and a wide-range of computer applications in Nepali language are the main results of a UNESCO supported project to normalize Nepali ?Devanagari? as the standard font for local language computing that was implemented by ?Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya?, a non-governmental organization based in Lalitpur, in Nepal.
In Nepal the Nepali Devanagari font (language) was utilized by some organizations while others used fonts such as ?Preeti?, ?Kantipur? and ?Fontasy Himali?. The various agencies had customized the software for their own institutions and there were no common standard in the country. The lack of standardization limited the transfer of data and information from one font to another because various fonts had to be downloaded and kept on each and every computer in order to open any document.
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DigiArts is a UNESCO web project promoting interdisciplinary fields of researches, activities related to digital cultural practices. In line with UNESCO?s contribution to implementing the WSIS Plan of Action, it especially aims at promoting training and human resource development in the use of ICTs and supporting cultural diversity and dialogue among cultures within a digital environment.
Young Digital Creators Programme empowers young people to construct, through a collaborative process and creative digital tools, a deeper understanding of each other's cultural values and shared perspectives related to global issues;
Masterclass modules in Art, Design and Technology in the Arab States demonstrates the importance of addressing ICT and digital creativity within existing curricula by strengthening learning opportunities through access to specific regional contents;
DigiArts Africa promotes the sustainability of creative content based on local resources and suited to the geo-cultural context with a firm support to ICT-based work in creative cultural industries.
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The project covers the digitization of parts of the rare books collections of the National Library of the Republic of Kazakhstan (NLRK) - some of them are included in UNESCO? Memory of the World Register. The project is being sponsored by IBM and the "Kus Zholy" Foundation of Kazkommertzbank which provide hard- and software and support a series of training for NLRK staff.. NLRK?s rare book and manuscript collections include more than 25,000 titles in Kazakh, Russian, and other Eastern and European languages from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Among them are 400 manuscripts in Persian, Arabic, Chagatai, Old Slavic, and Korean languages.
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The project ?Digitization of Recordings of Traditional Chinese Music? is aimed at making field recordings of Chinese music held by the Music Research Institute (MRI) of the Chinese Academy of Arts in Beijing digitally available. The collections which have has been included in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 1997, contain unique field recordings from the 1950s onward, which are in frequent demand.
The project included the purchase and installation of equipment, the digitization itself and the creation of a website to provide access to the digitised collections. Basic equipment includes a stand-alone, high quality analogue-to-digital converter and a PC with a high clock frequency and adequate amount of memory to serve as the digital audio workstation. For intermediary storage of the digitised signals a SCSI hard disk of highest available storage capacity is being used.
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UNESCO works closely with the University of Waikato (New Zealand) to enhance the open source "Greenstone" digital library software to enable easy and flexible use by librarians in making their collections available in digital form. The full package is available free-of-charge in English, French, Russian and Spanish on a UNESCO multilingual CD-ROM.
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The project "Harnessing ICTs for the audiovisual industry and public service broadcasting in developing countries" aims to advise developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America in the potentials of ICT-enhanced broadcasting, both in their audiovisual industry and public service broadcasting. Member States are supported in their international commitments and national policies in the audiovisual field and ICTs, by analysing current trends in broadcasting and formulating recommendations to the various partners involved. A second component of the project contributes to bridging the knowledge gap between developed and developing countries by providing capacity-building in broadcasting and audiovisual policy and encouraging pilot innovative solutions. The third component concerns content development on major societal and development issues.
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The project ?ICT for reducing poverty of indigenous people in the Caribbean? addresses poverty in isolated indigenous communities using integrated community media and the creation of multimedia products as the focus for a sustainable human development strategy. The purpose is to reduce isolation of the indigenous communities by providing access to ICT training and infrastructure, and enabling the development of local content in integrated community media. The programme will be implemented in Belize, Dominica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Suriname. Focus is on the specific situations of the indigenous peoples on the Caribbean region. A collaborative partnership has been established for implementation of the programme in Belize with the Belize Indigenous Training Institute as well as the Mayan Leaders Alliance, the Tumul Kin Centre of Learning in Blue Creek and the Hamalali Garinagu Radio in Dangriga.
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UNESCO in partnership with the Académie Africaine des Langues (ACALAN), the Agence intergouvernementale de la Francophonie (AIF) and the Government of Mali, is organising a Conference on ?Multilingualism for Cultural Diversity and Participation of All in Cyberspace? in Bamako, Mali, from 6 to 7 May 2005. The event is one of UNESCO?s thematic meetings in preparation for the second meeting of the World Summit on the Information Society (Tunis, Tunisia; 16-18 November 2005).
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UNESCO encourages its Member States to develop strong policies which promote and facilitate language diversity on the Internet, create widely-available online tools and applications (such as terminologies, automatic translators, dictionaries) for content in local languages and encourage the sharing of best practices and information. Initiative B@bel and the "Recommendation on the promotion of multilingualism and universal access to Cyberspace" are both examples of UNESCO?s efforts to promote multilingualism and an equitable, culturally diverse and harmonious Cyberspace.
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As part of its support to Youth and Community, the UNESCO office in Beirut teams up with the Ministry of Tourism, municipalities, international and local NGOs and the private sector to ?Promote Rural Tourism using ICT?. This pilot project started by selecting five regions in Lebanon (Bchari, Niha, Hasbayya, Saida and Kfardibian) and to train people in the use of ICTs for promoting tourism. So far, more than twenty college graduates were trained on project management to be able to assist their community to improve and enhance tourism services.. The activity is planned to be up-scaled to all parts of Lebanon and to other sectors beyond tourism.
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Reel Intercultural Dialogue is a series of five short fiction films produced by UNESCO in collaboration with cinema and television schools in Burkina Faso, India, Israel, Mexico and Romania aiming at increasing intercultural understanding and sensitising young people to tolerance, dialogue and peace. While providing a reflection on the sources of conflict between communities and cultures, the films present alternatives to violence and cultural domination.
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The Slave Trade Archives Project set up by UNESCO and funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) (1999-2005) ailed at improving the conservation and accessibility of slave trade records. It dealt with original documentary sources bearing witness to the trade, mainly in the form of written documents. Digitization of these sources, particularly those at risk from deterioration, has helped to establish a collective memory of this part of history. The project was based on a desire to guarantee the protection and accessibility of documents with universal value through digitization. It did not aim to restore or reconstitute the original collections themselves. The project main goal was to improve access to and use of documents related to the slave trade and its various forms, in order to highlight its impact and lasting consequences. An access strategy has been outlined with a view to establishing on-line access through the UNESCO website and other sites devoted to the slave trade, as well as publishing multimedia CD-ROMs on the slave trade, acts of resistance to slavery, etc.
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UNESCO?s ?Small Islands? Voice? (SIV) initiative focuses on Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Through an innovative combination of new and existing information and communication technologies the project aims to promote the effective participation of civil society, including young people, in sustainable island development. ?Small Islands? Voice? focuses on strengthening the interregional dimension of development and environmental issues through ICT enabled interregional dialogue, meetings and exchanges. It also contributes to the review process of the Barbados+10 Programme of Action for SIDS in 2004 and the follow-up at the local level.
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Using the more traditional technology of radio to reach large audiences in innovative and engaging ways, the Silk Road Radio Project in Tajikistan-Uzbekistan highlights contemporary issues and priorities through a twice-weekly radio drama series, produced and transmitted in both Uzbek and Tajik languages. Building on a centuries? old tradition of story-telling in the region, the themes dealt with in the radio dramas can be grouped in three categories in accordance with the priority areas of the main funding agencies: family and reproductive health, agricultural themes, and contemporary national issues such as humane and considerate treatment of displaced and underprivileged groups in society, ethnic harmony and tolerance in society and the trafficking of women.
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