Nüshu is an endangered language from Jiangyong County, China, and the world's only known writing system created and used exclusively by women.Recent Natural Language Processing (NLP) work has digitized small Nüshu-Chinese corpora, but the script remains computationally inaccessible due to its handwritten, mixedmedia form and dearth of multimodal resources.We address this gap with two novel datasets: NüshuVision, an image corpus of 500 rendered sentences in traditional vertical, right-to-left orthography, and NüshuStrokes, the first sequential handwriting recordings of all 397 Unicode Nüshu characters by an expert calligrapher.Evaluating five state-of-the-art Chinese Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems on NüshuVision shows that all fail entirely, each yielding a Character Error Rate (CER) of 1.0.Fine-tuning Microsoft's TrOCR on NüshuVision lowers CER to 0.67, a modest yet meaningful improvement.These contributions establish the first multimodal foundation for Nüshu revitalization and offer a culturally grounded framework for language preservation.

Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Ivory Yang, Shiyu Ji, Joice Chen, Farnoosh Hashemi, Shubham Mohole, Ethan Gearey, Michael Macy, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.