A Visual Dictionary for an Extinct Language

Cultural heritage artefacts are often digitised in order to allow for them to be easily accessed by researchers and scholars. In the case of the Bleek and Lloyd dictionary of the vertical bar xam Bushman language, 14000 pages were digitised. These pages could not be transcribed, however, because the language and script are both extinct. A custom digital library system was therefore created to manage and provide access to this collection as a purely "visual dictionary". Results from user testing showed that users found the system to be interesting, simple, efficient and informative.