How to Type, Igbo, and Data
As Jay would say: Chineke mere m ebere.
Context to me
I’m the kid of immigrants. Nigerian-born parents. American-born Chinwe. I — until very recently — did not know how to speak Igbo, the native language of my parents. This is typical for many American-born Nigerians (minus the recently-knowing-how-to-speak-Igbo part).
Professionally, you could say I’m designer and technologist.
Meet Mimi
Then there’s Mimi. Designer. Igbo. Technologist. It’s basically me but with a career. I watched an Eyeo talk that she did in 2017 and have been intrigued by her projects ever since.
Mimi’s work mainly touches on data. More specifically, that which can be revealed about communities through the way data is collected. A quick breeze through her website contains a few of her experiments and installations, including one of my favorites — The Library of Missing Datasets.
I also noticed that she put the ntupo in her name.
The Igbo alphabet includes many glyphs with a dot below, as in Ọnụọha, known as ntupo.
It just took me like 2 minutes to Google the characters to type out “Ọnụọha”
However, it is not easy at all to normally type like this because there are no/few shortcuts for these glyphs. So normally if you type Igbo on the internet, you just pretend these glyphs don’t exist and context-clues your way through the sentences.
The lack of accessibility to type Igbo correctly is always something that has struck me sideways. Seeing Mimi’s name with ntupo on her website clearly showed me that:
- She had to search for a typeface that had those glyphs (few in number from my personal experience).
- She probably looked up the Unicode value of those characters or copy-pasted them.
Looking at Mimi’s website, Google Translate from English to Igbo words, or BBC Igbo articles prove that these characters exist and are able to be used. At the same time, the large disconnect between the people who would probably use these characters daily and the people who actually do give evidence to an underlying problem with how hardware shortcuts imply some kind of language preference.
I then very quickly began to draw a link between these inaccessible glyphs and Mimi’s work, the presence of one kind of information and the absence of another.
The Video
Using a portion of her Eyeo talk, I combined the narratives of Mimi’s world of data, my frustration with inaccesible ntupo glyphs under the common link of Igbo to produce a short motion visual.
