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

引言在欧洲帝国主义在19世纪的鼎盛时期，中国被卷入了全球信息技术的新发展，而这并不是中国自己的设计。它基于一套语言技术和符号系统（如电报及其伴随的编码系统），而这些技术和系统依赖于汉语所不具备的东西，即字母文字。随之而来的是长达世纪的对汉字技术局限性和潜力的批判性实验。围绕着“中国问题”，出现了一种创新文化，这种文化涉及到大量的跨国字符，并最终发展成一种新的基于字符的信息基础设施，这种基础设施将管理一个巨大的基于汉字的信息环境，包括索引、列表、目录、字典、盲文、电报码、速记码、排版机、打字机、计算机、短信等等。根据在10多个国家的55个档案馆、特别收藏、博物馆、私人收藏和遗址中进行的档案和口述历史工作，该项目绘制了这一新颖的中国信息基础设施的全球历史，采用了其最重要和最具说明性的领域，中文打字机，作为一个透镜，通过它来了解这段更广泛的历史。智力价值该项目与历史之外的至少十个不同领域的学术研究进行直接对话科学技术作为对现代东亚历史未被研究的一个方面的研究，该项目对中国，日本和韩国历史专家具有重要意义。作为一个历史，涉及广泛的大公司，包括IBM，兰德公司，Mergenthaler，Olivetti和王实验室（以及许多其他），该项目建立在商业史，经济学和政治学的奖学金。与汉语本身的历史密切相关，该项目还借鉴和促进了语言学和文化研究。与此同时，中国打字机女孩的迷人和未经审查的历史可能会引起国内外妇女研究人员的兴趣。潜在的更广泛的影响在学术界之外，这个项目将引起专业和公众圈子内广泛观众的浓厚兴趣。它将为设计，人机交互，自然语言处理和计算机科学的其他分支的实践者和理论家提供轻松的入口，进入仍然知之甚少的中国信息技术世界。在公共媒体中，该项目也将促进对中国信息技术的更深入的经验性理解;鉴于中国作为全球IT强国的崛起，获得这种理解比以往任何时候都更加重要。研究结果将通过各种媒体传播，包括单作者文章，合作文章，互动研究网站，公开讲座和专著。该项目还将继续为新的本科生和研究生课程的开发提供信息，这些课程与技术史有关，特别是在非西方背景下。

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.