WHIRL or the Western Hemisphere Indigenous Reference Library is a project that aims to create a comprehensive digital archive dedicated to the archiving of manuscripts that display indigenous writing systems/graphical notational methods from across the western hemisphere. By archiving these writing systems, this project aims to ensure their preservation for future generations and enable further research into their linguistic and cultural significance.
The digital archive will include high-resolution images, descriptions, historical context, and analysis of each writing system and included manuscript. Additionally, this blog will serve as a place to present information to further explore these various systems, the cultures that created them, and their history.
Importantly the focus and emphasis on indigenous writing methods that existed before Afro-Eurasian contact is not because this body of literature is more important or authentic then oral literature or literary methods that were invented after contact. Instead this project exists because of the lack of digital humanities work on pre-contact indigenous writing systems. If you are interested in similar projects that focus on oral literature or post-contact traditions there are several amazing projects you can check out such as the Archive of Native American Recorded History, the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence, and the Native American Literary Atlas.