The SEI goal is for encoding old scripts, not much about preserving their artistic shapes. I think that the Endangered Alphabets Project is focusing on preserving the artistic typography of old scripts (but not only old scripts, this also concerns modern scripts whise evolution is oversimplifying the glyphs, or some other typographic features, for example in Arabic).
So SEI wants to preserve the heritage of texts (how they were spelled, their meaning, how we can perform translations, or initiate researches about it, preserving cultural heritages that are being lost now that oral cultures are getting forgotten). It promotes the urgent need for enconding the characters, but with a minimum and sufficient set of representative glyphs. This fully goes in the goal of Unicode. The Endandered Alphabets Projects ("EAP") on the opposite focuses on glyphs, the way characters were actually drawn (as found in publications or in internal working documents, and in artworks), which are not covered directly by Unicode and ISO 10646, even if the site also speaks about scripts that are still not encoded and for which the only way to preserve them is to keep their graphic form, before they are completely understood and may-be later encoded. The two projects are not duplicates, even if they may have an intersection (a small one, IMHO). Both projects are valuable for the more general focus of preserving the cultural heritages of humanity. The SEI is highly technical, the EAP is highly cultural, but both are insteresting subjects of scientific studies. -- Philippe. 2011/9/3 Christopher Fynn <chris.f...@gmail.com>: > How does this differ from what the Script Encoding Initiative > <http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/> is already trying to do? > > Chris