Tom Mullaney · Stanford Dept. of History
From the Chinese Typewriter to Silicon Valley

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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 said that, while the physical technology of the telegraph - the machinery of it - was an immense achievement that granted humans a power bordering on the god-like, the semiotic architecture of telegraphy remained crude and bounded owing to the close connection between telegraphic codes and actually existing human languages (namely English - but also alphabetic languages more broadly). He called for the development of a perfect universal symbolic language whose sophistication would measure up to the brilliance of the machine, rather than hold it back. As Professor Mullaney will show, this Frenchman's call to action was picked up and examined in China for some 150 years, to a far greater extent than in any other part of the world. Whereas the rest of the world, and particularly the Euro-American world, proceeded to develop ever-more sophisticated apparatuses of information technology, it was in China where questions of semiotic interface, user-machine interaction, and mediation were central to experimentation and innovation for nearly two centuries. Examining three Chinese character information technologies - the Chinese telegraph, the Chinese typewriter, and the Chinese dictionary - Professor Mullaney will examine the ways in which HCI questions 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: 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 paper 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.

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 (University of California Press, 2011) 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: The History, Representation, and Identity of China's Majority (University of California Press, 2012), an edited volume that brings together path breaking new research on China's ethnic majority. He is currently working on a global history of China's nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of a character-based information infrastructure, examining in particular the development of Chinese telegraph codes, typewriting, character retrieval systems, shorthand, and Braille.