ELK Project Overview

This project is an extension of ACORNS ([A][C]quisition [O]f [R]estored [N]ative [S]peech) which is designed to support tribal efforts to revitalize language and culture. The acronyms are in honor of the tribes of Northern California who helped to spawn this effort. Among these tribes the ACORN is sacred, and elks are plentiful.

The ACORNS project is a long-term development effort involving both graduate and undergraduate students. ACORNS and ELK software is free for download. (ELK software is also open-source.) By downloading and using the applications, you agree to not sell, or reverse engineer the software for profit. Please contact the author, Dan Harvey ( harveyd@sou.edu) if you have questions or comments. We welcome suggestions and developer contributions to the ELK project.

There are two applications associated with the ELK project. The first, called ELK is used to create keyboard mappings using the popular XML-based format, .keylayout, that is the standard on MAC systems. This application can also create .ttf files remapping glyphs to reflect altered keyboard mappings. These .ttf files are a universal format for fonts. The ELK application is written in Java and therefore runs on all platforms.

The second ELK application, ELKKeyboards is a windows-based application that makes use of keyboard mappings created by ELK.