A Chinese Typewriter in Silicon Valley

Google Tech Talk
December 5, 2011
A Chinese Typewriter in Silicon Valley: What 150 Years of Chinese Information Technology can Teach the Alphabetic World
Presented by Thomas S. Mullaney.
ABSTRACT
In 1862, an eccentric Frenchman published two essays about telegraphy: the first, a proposal for a Chinese telegraph code, and the second, a critique of Morse Code. Inspired by his study of Chinese, he argued that symbolic languages like Morse and other telegraph codes failed to measure up to the brilliance and power of the physical technology of the telegraph. Whereas the telegraph-as-machine was an immense achievement that granted humans a power bordering on the god-like, the semiotic architecture of telegraph codes remained crude and bounded to the languages out of which they were developed (namely English -- but also alphabetic languages more broadly). What was needed, he argued, was a symbolic interface that transcended existing human language, a human-machine interface that would unlock rather than inhibit the awesome potential of new communication technologies. I will show, this Frenchman's call to action was picked up and examined to a far greater extent than in any other part of the world. As compared to the Euro-American world of information technology, wherein ever-more sophisticated apparatuses of information technology were developed, Chinese experimentation centered on questions of semiotic interface, user-machine interaction, and mediation for some 150 years. This focus was not coincident, moreover, but rather emerged out of the specifically tortuous process by which Chinese engineers proceeded to "translate" alphabet-centered technologies like the telegraph and typewriter so as to make them useful within a culture and civilization whose script was not alphabetic, but character-based. Examining three Chinese character information technologies -- the Chinese telegraph, the Chinese typewriter, and the Chinese computer -- I will examine the ways in which questions of interface were central to the history of modern Chinese information technology from the start, and will show that the history of China has involved something like the inverse of the Frenchman's critique: namely, that those working in the Chinese character information environment went on to develop interfaces and systems of mediation that far outstripped the capacities of existing apparatuses, only becoming usable (and remarkably powerful) with the rise of electrical automation and modern computing. The presentation will conclude with a reflection on a recent achievement in Chinese history: the development of a Chinese input method that posts speeds faster than in alphabetic typing, a feat that was unimaginable only decades earlier.
Speaker Info:
Thomas S. Mullaney is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at Stanford University. His first book, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (2010) examines the process by which Chinese social scientists and Communist state authorities decided which of the country's minority groups to recognize, and how this transformed the modern Chinese nation-state. He is also principal editor of Critical Han Studies: Understanding the Largest Ethnic Group on Earth (forthcoming 2011), an edited volume that brings together path breaking new research on China's ethnic majority. His current book project, The Chinese Typewriter: A Global History of Technolinguistic Modernity, examines China's nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of a character-based information infrastructure encompassing Chinese telegraphy, typewriting, character retrieval systems, shorthand, Braille, word processing, and computing. His website can be found at www.tsmullaney.com.

[@clarepan1592]

Mullaney's research is amazing! It sounds really very solid and interesting

[@Nilguiri]

Very interesting.

[@MdotWelblech]

No discussion of particle-sequence based compositing input like on a numeric telephone keypad, perhaps because it is not suited to a tray of precast lead characters?

[@yaolianchen3819]

Now type Chinese characters with numeric telephone keypad is quite suited.

[@swo2376]

Historically fascinating, not sure what kind of modern innovation it can inspire since predictive text is old news now, but who knows. I guess if he wants to know how optimization occurred, he should get a 3D printer, make some of these machines, shut some Chinese ppl in rooms together and have them "text" each other with them abt certain topics, and see how they slowly reorganize their own keyboards. Or try it himself by lining up 26 letters of the alphabet in alphabetical order and watch how he re-invents the qwerty keyboard.

[@sjtez]

I get that he's looking into the work-a-rounds of the Chinese using their script with modern technology. He wants to look at this as inspiration for innovation as opposed to proof of the anti-modernity of the Chinese script. It's hard to do that after watching this though. A better example would be the Korean's invention of Hangul that came out about the same time as the invention of the printing press. That strikes me as brilliant innovation, especially compared to what was brought up here. For comparison, it would be hard to look to a society which refused to adopt Arabic numbers at all, and try to find inspiration for innovation from it. Sure you can come up with some creative work-a-rounds to not using the number zero etc., but there's a more obvious, arguably better, innovation you have to stubbornly overlook in order to do so. Refusing to record spoken language phonetically seems like one of those things. Chinese characters are beautiful and so are many old things, like the aqueducts. Brilliant for their time, but not the most practical solutions for modern needs. Am I missing something here? What kind of innovation is he hoping this will inspire? Organizing pieces of information based on relevance to each other has been around for a while, this site KZbin uses it in recommendations all the time, though website cookies can make you wish it wasn't (looking at you ads and Amazon). Also, just in the realm of typing, doesn't the increased speed you can type words by rearranging your keyboard to match your word usage pale in comparison to other solutions? Stenograph machines have been around about 150 years, allowing people to type much faster than regular speech. I don't know, I cant help but feel I am missing the whole point of this and wasted a decent chunk of time.

[@nikolamilicic9638]

Very interesting talk, but Chinese language is one really old fashioned language and there is no strict rule, cause of it it is very difficult to learn...

[@ericwong4960]

Finally, although I'm almost 10 years late, as a Chinese diaspora, I see this as an unbiased research, unlike those Western videos licking China just throwing "did you know Chinese invented predictive text before us?"

[@containternet9290]

It's actually rare to see positive news on China from the West.

[@hugo90680]

Hahahahahaahahahahahah