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Coming to terms with the nation
China is a vast nation comprised of hundreds of distinct ethnic communities, each with its own language, history, and culture. Today the government of China recognizes just 56 ethnic nationalities, or minzu, as groups entitled to representation. This controversial new book recounts the history of the most sweeping attempt to sort and categorize the nation's enormous population: the 1954 Ethnic Classification project (minzu shibie). Thomas S. Mullaney draws on recently declassified material and extensive oral histories to describe how the communist government, in power less than a decade, launched this process in ethnically diverse Yunnan. Mullaney shows how the government drew on Republican-era scholarship for conceptual and methodological inspiration as it developed a strategy for identifying minzu and how non-Party-member Chinese ethnologists produced a \"scientific\" survey that would become the basis for a policy on nationalities.
eBook
The Chinese computer : a global history of the information age
\"Exploration of the largely unknown history of Chinese-language computing systems, accessible to an audience unfamiliar with the Chinese language or the technical workings of personal computers\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
QWERTY in China: Chinese Computing and the Radical Alphabet
Since the late 1980s, computers throughout the Sinophone world have featured QWERTY keyboards, employing input techniques that rely upon the Latin alphabet. In this article, I argue that historians of modern China and modern information technology alike have profoundly misunderstood China's QWERTY keyboard and oversimplified the history of China's engagement with the Latin alphabet during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Scholars have been too quick to fixate on the narrower issue of phoneticization: that is, of attempts to re-inscribe Chinese by creating Latin alphabet-based writing systems that rewire the circuitry of Chinese linguistic signification with the goal of bypassing (and ultimately abolishing) Chinese characters altogether. The historical record alerts us to a much broader history of \"Chinese alphabets,\" however. Based upon three cases, this article explores some of the many schemes in which the goal was to alphabetize Chinese, while also leaving character-based Chinese writing intact.
Journal Article
Shift CTRL: Computing and New Media as Global, Cultural, Sociopolitical, and Ecological
We are living in a golden age for the study of information and language technologies in the modern period, and perhaps even more so for the study of computing and new media. Sustained by enduring engagements with Book History, Actor-Network-Theory, the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) program, and Science, Technology, and Society (STS)—but also rejuvenated by concerns with cultural techniques, material semiotics, the aesthetics of bureaucracy, paperwork studies, media archaeology, neo-cybernetics, software studies, platform studies, and more—scholars have grappled with subject matter as diverse as the origins of the card catalog, the MP3 file format, French revolution-era paperwork and bureaucracy, xerography, TCP/IP protocol, spam, and more. Such variety conceals an underlying homogeneity, however. With important exceptions, recent studies have focused predominantly on the Western world, and within that, typically the English-language/Latin-alphabetic environment. By way of perspective, of the more than 120 titles published on five influential MIT Press series—\"Inside Technology,\" \"History of Computing,\" \"Infrastructures,\" \"Software Studies,\" and \"Platform Studies\"—only five focus in any sustained way upon Asia, the Middle East, or Africa. Meanwhile, in the relatively new yet highly influential \"Electronic Mediations\" series on the University of Minnesota Press, not a single monograph-length study deals with computing, gaming, or electronic mediation anywhere in the Non-Western world. In sharp contrast to the long tradition among Early Modernists of engaging with Non-Western information societies, then, once we reach the twentieth century, the world beyond Europe and North America almost ceases to exist.
Journal Article
Controlling the Kanjisphere: The Rise of the Sino-Japanese Typewriter and the Birth of CJK
Japan has been home to two distinct approaches to typewriting, the first oriented exclusively towards the typing of kana and the second oriented towards kanji. In look and feel, this first family of machines was indistinguishable from those built by Remington, Underwood, or Olivetti. The second, however, was indistinguishable from typewriters already being produced in China: tray bed machines featuring approximately 2,500 of the most commonly used characters. In part because of this Janus-faced approach to the typewriter, Japanese companies succeeded in penetrating the Chinese information technology market where Western manufacturers had failed, making inroads as early as the 1920s. With the expansion of empire-building in 1931, and the outbreak of war in 1937, Japan came to dominate the entire Chinese typewriter market. In giving rise to the Japanese-built Chinese typewriter, this historic period also gave shape to what is now understood within information technology circles as CJK: the distinct Chinese-Japanese-Korean technolinguistic zone.
Journal Article
The Moveable Typewriter: How Chinese Typists Developed Predictive Text during the Height of Maoism
Mullaney discusses history of typewriting in the Maoist period that offers a vantage point into the much broader, global history of a vast and complex Chinese information infrastructure developed during the modern period. Typesetters and typists in the early Communist period undertook a highly sophisticated, precomputing exploration of a linguistic technology that would later come to be known as \"predictive text.\"
Journal Article
