Please join MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society today for the final STS Colloquium of the semester. Event details are as follow:
TODAY (12/9/2013) 4 PM MIT Campus E51-095 3:30 Wine and Cheese Reception Speaker: Thomas Mullaney, Stanford Discussant: Briand Rotman, Ohio State "QWERTY is Dead! Long Live QWERTY! The Birth of Input in Twentieth-Century China" Ever since the mass manufacture of keyboard typewriters began in the United States, engineers, entrepreneurs, and everyday men and women around the world began to imagine a day when this new device would conquer the Chinese language. It never did, with Remington, Underwood, and indeed all typewriter and Linotype companies failing to enter the Chinese market. This dream was renewed in the age of computing and, starting in the 1990s, seemed to have come true: computers throughout China began to look "just like ours," even including the familiar QWERTY keyboard, which by today is ubiquitous. It would seem that the keyboard had finally conquered Chinese, the last major hold-out in a world otherwise dominated by alphanumeric information technologies. Closer examination reveals, however, that the keyboard in China is used in ways that diverge radically from elsewhere in the world. In contrast to keyboard "typing," where a user assumes one-to-one relationships between the symbols-upon-the-key and the symbols-upon-the-screen, Chinese "input" assumes no such condition of identity. Within the technolinguistic practice of input, the user stands "beside" the alphabet, to draw upon the powerful concept by Brian Rotman, and exploits the vast space of possibility that opens up when one assumes and plays with non-identity. The key marked 'Q' might be used to represent itself, but more likely it will be used to provide any number of instructions or criteria to a piece of software known as an "Input Method Editor," which will use these instructions to find the desired character for the user. There is no single way to manage this process, moreover, with users employing dozens of varieties and subvarieties of IMEs, wherein the symbol 'Q' might just as easily indicate structural features of the desired character, phonetic ones, or some combination of the two. It was not the keyboard that conquered Chinese, as preordained, but Chinese that conquered the keyboard. In China, the QWERTY keyboard and typing as we know them are dead, and have been reborn as something quite different: input. In this talk, Tom Mullaney will examine the conceptual and practical roots of Chinese input in the early twentieth century, as well as the machine that inaugurated the "age of input": the MingKwai Chinese Typewriter, developed in the 1940s by linguist, author, and cultural critic Lin Yutang.
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