New Scientist - USA (2022-04-09)

9 April 2022 | New Scientist | 51

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Quantum hairdos

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the week in weird p56

Tom Gauld for 

New Scientist

A cartoonist’s take

on the world p55

Almost the last word

Why does some

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emotions? p54

Puzzles

Try our crossword,

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logic puzzle p53

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for New Scientist

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side of life p56

Layal Liverpool is a science
journalist based in Berlin.
She believes everyone can
be a scientist, including you.
@layallivs

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These articles are

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What you need
Access to the Glyph website
at glyph.shh.mpg.de

STOP reading for a moment and

instead take a closer look at the

letters that make up each of the

words in this sentence. What

shapes do the different letters

in the alphabet have in common?

What makes each letter unique?

Yoolim Kim at Harvard

University and her colleagues

at the Max Planck Institute for

the Science of Human History

in Germany are trying to answer

these questions. They are

interested in analysing writing

and graphical communication

systems from around the world

(see picture). You can help

them by taking part in the

Glyph citizen science project.

In the Glyph online game,

you will be presented with a set

of characters – such as the letters

in this clause – and asked to select

as many characters as possible

based on simple rules you create

yourself. For instance, I could

select “h”, “i”, “l”, “n”, “r”, “t” and

“u” from the clause in the previous

sentence, because those letters

all have vertical lines in them.

The Glyph research team is

using the data generated by

volunteers to identify the building

blocks of letters from more than

40 different writing systems. The

more rules you create as you play,

the more points you gain and

the more scripts you will unlock

to analyse. You will get bonus

points for creating unique rules.

The researchers hope that the

data from players will help them

to understand the relationships

between letters within writing

systems in terms of how people

Spot visual patterns in the world’s written languages to boost

the science of graphical communication, says Layal Liverpool

Citizen science

Unlock the secrets of letters

perceive them, as well as how

those letters are pronounced

in spoken language.

“Writing for us is a lens through

which we can look at the bigger

question of how sound and form

is linked in a meaningful way,”

says Kim. For instance, it will be

possible to explore whether letters

that sound similar when spoken

are also perceived by people as

having similar shapes or features

in their written form, she says.

Preliminary results from the

Glyph project suggest that people

often converge on similar sets

of rules for classifying letters.

“You might describe it as left

to right symmetry, or I might

describe it as vertical or horizontal

lines – but, conceptually, you

and I have kind of identified

the same thing,” says Kim.

Spotting these sorts of
shared patterns in how people
perceive letters could aid the
development of more effective
methods for teaching people
how to read and write, she says.
Learning how people combine
letters to form words is also of
interest to linguists. “Word games
like Wordle are becoming very
popular, for example, and a lot
of researchers are after that data,
because that probably contains
tonnes of insights,” says Kim.
As with Wordle, I found
Glyph to be an excellent workout
for my brain. Visit the Glyph
website to join in the fun
Citizen science appears and boost the research.  ❚
every four weeks

Next week
Science of cooking