A History of the Impact of Euro-American Linguistic Technologies on Chinese Information Infrastructure

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IntroductionDuring the height of European imperialism in the nineteenth century, China was caught up in a new development in global information technology that was not of its own design. It was predicated on a set of linguistic technologies and symbolic systems (such as the telegraph and its attendant encoding systems) that depended upon something the Chinese language does not possess, an alphabetic script. What ensued was over a century of critical experimentation with the technological limits and potentials of Chinese script. Involving a vast, transnational cast of characters, a culture of innovation emerged around the Chinese Problem, and culminated in the development of a new character-based information infrastructure that would come to govern an immense Chinese character-based information environment, including indexes, lists, catalogs, dictionaries, Braille, telegraph codes, stenograph codes, typesetting machines, typewriters, computers, text messaging, and so forth. Based upon archival and oral historical work conducted in 55 archives, special collections, museums, private collections, and sites in more than ten countries, this project charts the global history of this novel Chinese information infrastructure, employing its most important and illustrative domain, the Chinese typewriter, as a lens through which to understand this broader history.Intellectual Merit This project is in direct conversation with scholarship in at least ten distinct fields beyond the history of science and technology. As a study of an unexamined aspect of modern East Asian history, this project is of critical interest to specialists in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean history. As a history involving a wide array of major corporations including IBM, the RAND Corporation, Mergenthaler, Olivetti, and Wang Laboratories (among many others), the project builds on scholarship in Business History, Economics, and Political Science. Closely connected to the history of the Chinese language itself, this project also draws upon and contributes to Linguistics and Cultural Studies. At the same time, the fascinating and unexamined history of the Chinese Typewriter Girl is likely to be of interest to researchers in Women's Studies, both inside and outside of China.Potential Broader Impacts Beyond academia, this project will be of substantial interest to a broad audience within professional and public circles. It will provide easy entry to practitioners and theorists in design, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, and other branches of computer science into the still poorly understood world of Chinese information technology. Within the public media, this project will foster a deeper, empirical understanding of Chinese information technology as well; given China's emergence as a global IT powerhouse, acquiring that understanding has become more critical than ever. Results of the research will be disseminated through a wide variety of media, including single-author articles, collaborative articles, an interactive research website, public lectures, and a book monograph. This project will also continue to inform the development of new undergraduate and graduate coursework pertaining to the history of technology, particularly in non-Western contexts.