Unicode and the Humanities

Description

Until the 1990s, world scripts existed in a digital Tower of Babel. With the exception of unaccented Latin characters, texts written on one computer (or sometimes even in one application) were often garbled when viewed on another.  Examples of garbled scripts abound: Sinographs that were excluded from officially mandated national curricula; similar characters that were encoded differently in China, Korea, and Japan; Indic languages that had to be written with Latin characters; and users of more than one non-Latin script who had to own a different computer for each script. With the advent of the Unicode Standard, however, this Tower of Babel of garbled and inaccessible scripts came crashing down. Each new version added new scripts, and today 161 scripts can be written and read on virtually any digital device. 

Since about 91 percent of the users of non-Latin scripts live in Asia (closer to 95 percent if we include users of Arabic characters in the Middle East), the study of Unicode is central to research about Asia.  Yet the study of Unicode has remained a largely technical concern, left to the domain of computer scientists, linguists, and typeface designers. This conference builds on a nascent wave of interest among scholars in the Humanities to ask how disciplines from Anthropology to Classics, History, the History of Technology, Literary Studies, and beyond can contribute to thinking about Unicode.  Examples include the role of Unicode in mediating global scripts, the benefits and unintended consequences of creating global standards for Asian languages, the relationship between the ability or inability to represent one’s script and various creative and literary practices, the consequences of having software companies as the most influential stakeholders in the Unicode Consortium, and the role of Unicode in gatekeeping everything from rare historical characters to emoji.

Even though the Unicode Standard may be the most important global technology of linguistic representation since the printing press, it remains a black box for most scholars in the Humanities.  This conference will bring together two communities. On the one hand are technical experts, whether members of technology companies, language specialists, or typeface designers, who have been deeply involved in the practice of script encoding. On the other are scholars in the Humanities who work on writing technologies, non-Latin scripts, and digital media in Asia.  Members of the Unicode Consortium have themselves requested greater participation from scholars in the Humanities and expressed interest in bringing these two communities together.  A discussion of the affordances of Unicode, of its role in the longer history of technologies of writing, of its stakes, of its impact on  world scripts, and of its possible futures is long overdue.

Organizers

• Raja Adal, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh

• Chris Lowy, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University

Presenters

• Jon Abel, Pennsylvania State University

• Raja Adal, University of Pittsburgh

• Deborah Anderson, University of California, Berkeley

• Andrew Glass, The Unicode Consortium

• Zev Handel, University of Washington, Seattle

• Anushah Hossain, Stanford University

• Uluğ Kuzuoğlu, Washington University in St. Louis

• Christopher Lowy, Carnegie Mellon University

• Ken Lunde, The Unicode Consortium

• Thomas Milo, DecoType

• Kiyonori Nagasaki, International Institute for Digital Humanities, Tokyo

• Anshuman Pandey, University of California, Berkeley

• Logan Simpson, Queen Mary University of London

• Mark Turin, University of British Columbia

• Yifán Wáng, International Institute for Digital Humanities, Tokyo

• Isabelle Zaugg, Independent Scholar

Auditors

• Manish Goregaokar, The Unicode Consortium

• Alison Langmead, University of Pittsburgh

• Karthik Ranganathan, Digital Humanities Foundation, the Netherlands

• Christopher Warren, Carnegie Mellon University

Paper Topics

Jon Abel, “Bugs as Features of an Un-unified Code: The Pleasures and Horrors of Mojibake”

Raja Adal, “Script Reform and Writing Technologies: The Typewriter in teh World of Latin, Arabic, and Devanagari Characters”

Deborah Anderson, “Twenty Years of Bridging the Gap Between Unicode and the Humanities: Insights from the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley”

Andrew Glass, “Standardizing the Unstandardized: Ancient Scripts and Unicode”

Zev Handel, “Adventures in CJKV, Nôm, Zhuang, Khitan, and Jurchen: A case study on writing up academic research involving obscure Sinoform characters and the challenges of figuring what is and isn’t in Unicode”

Anushah Hossain, “ISCII Imperialism”

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu, “Unicode and the Birth of the Global Neoliberal Information Economy”

Christopher Lowy, “Literary Expression at the Ends of Unicode: The Strange Case of EnJoe Toh”

Ken Lunde, "Genuine Han Unification"

Thomas Milo, “Scholarship in Digitalistan: Some Considerations"

Kiyonori Nagasaki and Yifán Wáng, “Character Encoding for East Asian and Buddhist Studies: Experiences with the SAT Database Project”

Anshuman Pandey, "Characters for a Community: Script Invention Trends in South Asia in the Age of Unicode"

Logan Simpson, “What Makes a Script Successful? Insights into the Implementation of Visual Cultural Elements and the Reasons behind Script Invention”

Mark Turin, “Type Write / Type Right: The Uneven Promise of Unicode for Indigenous and Endangered Languages”

Isabelle Zaugg, "Digital Governance Institutions and Digital Language Diversity"

Program

All events are public, but there will be no presentations.  All of the time will be used to discuss each other's works.  As a consequence, it is essential for all attendees to read the pre-circulated papers for the panel that they are attending.  To request access to papers, please email raja.adal@pitt.edu with your affiliation and the panel(s) that you are planning to attend.

Venue: Room 340, Posner Hall, Carnegie Mellon University (map)

Friday February 2nd

9:45-10:00 am  Greetings and introductory remarks

10:00-12:30 am  Encoding Unicode

Deborah Anderson, “Twenty Years of Bridging the Gap Between Unicode and the Humanities: Insights from the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley”

Anshuman Pandey, "Characters for a Community: Script Invention Trends in South Asia in the Age of Unicode"

Kiyonori Nagasaki and Yifán Wáng, “Character Encoding for East Asian and Buddhist Studies: Experiences with the SAT Database Project”

Isabelle Zaugg, "Digital Governance Institutions and Digital Language Diversity"

12:30-2:45 pm  Lunch

2:45-4:45 pm  Boundaries of Unicode

Ken Lunde, "Genuine Han Unification"

Thomas Milo, “Scholarship in Digitalistan: Some Considerations"

Mark Turin, “Type Write / Type Right: The Uneven Promise of Unicode for Indigenous and Endangered Languages”

4:45-5:00 pm  Break 

5:00-6:30 pm  Outside Unicode

Zev Handel, “Adventures in CJKV, Nôm, Zhuang, Khitan, and Jurchen: A case study on writing up academic research involving obscure Sinoform characters and the challenges of figuring what is and isn’t in Unicode”

Christopher Lowy, “Literary Expression at the Ends of Unicode: The Strange Case of EnJoe Toh”

Saturday February 3rd

9:45-11:45 am  Before Unicode

Jon Abel, “Bugs as Features of an Un-unified Code: The Pleasures and Horrors of Mojibake”

Raja Adal, “Script Reform and Writing Technologies: Latin, Arabic, and Devanagari Characters in the Age of the Typewriter”

Logan Simpson, “What Makes a Script Successful? Insights into the Implementation of Visual Cultural Elements and the Reasons behind Script Invention”

11:45-2:00 pm  Lunch

2:00-4:00 pm  Unicode as a Global Standard

Andrew Glass, “Standardizing the Unstandardized: Ancient Scripts and Unicode”

Anushah Hossain, “ISCII Imperialism”

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu, “Unicode and the Birth of the Global Neoliberal Information Economy”

4:00-4:15 pm  Break

4:15-6:15 pm  Concluding plenary discussion

Sponsors

We are grateful for the generous support of the Japan Iron and Steel Federation and Mitsubishi endowments at the University of Pittsburgh, to the Dietrich College Seed Grant Funding from the Carnegie Mellon University, and to the Asian Studies and World History centers at the University of Pittsburgh.