` ❥~ TIANRAN QIAN ✶.✩
Research-based creative practioner, strategist, producer, and digital talent agent.
Exploring how to hack for space in this alien aesthetic machine.
Currenty based in New York
Research interests:
computational aesthetics, text-image transmediality, word concept relations, epistimology knowledge representation, print to electronic texuality, digital image, human-AI collaboration in art, Chinese calligraphy, comparative approaches...
tianran.space@gmail.com
@_tianran_
👀
✮ 01 ✮
2024.04
Research Presentation
Conference: Language: What Is It Good For? Graduate Conference
Hosted by: Department of Psychology & the Human Language and Development Lab @ The New School for Social Research This presentation reflects on my sense of strangeness with Chinese characters, as I've forgotten how to handwrite them after shifting to typing. It's as if there are two loops, one for calligraphy and one for typing, that position our bodies differently.
Chinese script evolved from the ideographic Oracle Bone Script to the modularized stroke characters with the Clerical Script, reflecting a shift in the visual and political function of characters. Calligraphy highlights the embodiment of writing, where the ink traces the moral character of the writer.
As China confronts Western modernization and adapts to more efficient information technologies, it faces the challenge of text retrieval. Drawing from Thomas Mullaney’s book, The Chinese Typewriter: A History, two pivotal innovations emerged in this technological pursuit: input and predictive text, both cornerstones of HCI, created out of necessity.
The belief that every symbol has a key led to the notion that alphabetic scripts possess a technolinguistic efficiency and immediacy that character-based Chinese writing struggles to match. How has the Chinese language adapted to the universal information technology system?
Even today, engineers strive to preserve the continuous external form of characters through discontinuous and now digital machines. Computational input is reduced to mere data, rendering our bodies transparent. Yuk Hui advocates for a crucial reflection on techno-diversity to understand how the social and the technical have shaped our present, where we face alienation and extraction of our body and language.
✰ 02 ✰
2023.05
Research Paper
Decoding Chinese Typewriting: China's Quest for Linguistic Modernity
China, speed. These two words seem coherent next to one another in today’s global context. The speed of deliveries, shipping, construction, mass production, and censorship is built upon a powerful and centralized information technology infrastructure. China’s accomplishment towards high productivity illuminates a success story of its modernization, which has manifested itself in the biggest IT market in the world. However, China was long considered incompatible with modernity, since the character system is fundamentally different from the alphabetical system of all existing information technologies that were considered advanced and efficient. The analog exploration of the intersection between two language systems, or two culturally distinct technological thoughts, revealed unexpected yet exciting innovations like input and predictive text, interactions now widely adapted to the computerized human-machine interaction (HCI) field. This paper reflects on China’s search for linguistic modernity and an information technology infrastructure and raises awareness of the underlying colonial and capitalistic challenges of modernity.
After China’s defeat during the Second Opium War in the 1840s, it was forced to face post-industrial Western modernization and the power of technological advancement. The process of Chinese modernization began after three thousand years of imperial rule. Over the past century, China has been modernizing itself to catch up with the West. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as China faces its old imperial system’s demise after Western nations’ colonial incursion, various political and social experimentations were performed under such historical uncertainty. “The rapid ascendance of the typewriter as a central mechanism of Western modernity paralleled a dramatic proliferation in bureaucratic inscription (consolidating various modes of official discourse and accelerating colonial and international channels of communication), even as it signaled the final dominance of alpha-mechanical orthography over more ‘tribal’ or ‘primitive’ modes of inscription” (Williams, 129). From Morse code, typewriting, and punchcard memory text encoding, to word processing and digital typography, these technologies were all developed based on the Latin alphabetical system (Mullaney, 9). The global proliferation of information technologies was facilitated by European colonialism and American dominance, leading to a history of false universalism that undertones the concept of modernity itself. Reformers reevaluated Chinese civilization to identify cultural changes necessary to adapt to a new global order while staying intact.
As one of the only experts on the Chinese typewriter, Stanford history professor Thomas Mullaney examines China’s quest to establish a Chinese information technology infrastructure in his book The Chinese Typewriter. With population increase, the rise of new forms of state surveillance, and unprecedented information technologies like telegraphy, Chinese elites underwent an “information crisis,” questioning their ability to keep up with the novel data environment (Mullaney, 248). Whether the Chinese script could be fundamentally incompatible with modernity’s technological requirements remains an essential dilemma. How can a language consisting of 90,000 characters be made compatible with the concept of a keyboard, featuring only 50 keys to enable a population of one billion people to keep up with the 20th-century globalization and modernization? Chinese political and intellectual leaders called for "Chinese language reform.” This movement included the simplification of Chinese characters, the use of vernacular Chinese (Baihua), and the promotion of mass literacy.
The early twentieth-century New Culture Movement envisions Vernacular Chinese as the first step towards Chinese linguistic modernity. Baihua was considered the very medium of the New Culture, as it was the platform for a new system of thinking, expression, and communication. Chinese literary theorist Xudong Zhang suggested that vernacularization was not only a national mass literacy endeavor with institutional and political significance but also a space where emotions, ethics, and aesthetics could communicate and manifest in. On the one hand, Vernacular Chinese was the nation's bridge to achieve the "congruence between culture and polity," a fundamental demand and the core feature of the modern nation-states that China strived to become. On the other hand, the movement reflects a search for a "universal" medium, which prepares qualified officials and ensures smooth information flow for the national administrative system while facilitating communication and trade in a unified domestic market under capitalist conditions.
Having no choice but to keep up with the porous and rapid expansion of information technology, China needed to build a telegraphic infrastructure for characters or a Chinese typewriter. This condition directs us back to the fundamental barrier of Chinese linguistic modernity—how to transmit, type, save, or retrieve any Chinese character in the first place? Mullaney introduced that the very first Chinese typewriter MingKwai was invented in 1947 by Lin Yutang (1919-1976), one of the most celebrated Chinese scholars and cultural figures of Lin's generation. Mingkwai was the first Chinese typewriter to possess keyboards, the very feature that defines typewriting. It looked similar to an alphabetic typewriter, although the mechanism was unique. For Western-style typewriting, the depression of one key leads to the impression of the corresponding symbol, meaning what you type is what you get. But MingKwai was designed for the retrieval of characters, as it "served as steps in the process of finding one's desired Chinese characters from within the machine's mechanical hard drive, and then inscribing them on the page" (Mullaney 246).
MingKwai's radical-stroke retrieval mechanism worked as follows, as Mullaney elucidated. The machine had 72 keys divided into three banks: upper keys, lower keys, and eight number keys. When pressing an upper key, inputting a character's upper structure, the internal gears would move and show the typist a mechanical array of Chinese character graphs contained inside the machine's chassis. The second key selects the lower structure of the character, narrowing down the search to eight characters that would appear in a view-finder called "Magic Eye." Depression of the third key selects one of the eight characters, and the machine finally imprints the desired character. Instead of directly typing, Chinese typewriting required from searching to writing, which is the act of "inputting." MingKwai marks the very beginning of the input method, now commonly used in HCI, highlighting a form of "retrieval composition" unlike the Western "inscription-composition." "This new mode of inscription 'encompasses a practically infinite variety of potential approaches, protocols, and symbolic systems'" (Mullaney 246).
However, MingKwai did not sweep the Chinese language market, although Lin and his daughter demonstrated the device to the Western media in Manhattan in the Summer of 1947. As the world was astonished by this groundbreaking innovation, Lin encountered heavy financial burdens which could not sustain MingKwai's further experimentation or production. China was also going through a major political shift, as Chiang Kai-shek stepped down in 1949 followed by the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) rise to power. Various linguistic debates were happening including Mao's proposal of full-scale Romanization of Chinese script. Investments waited for the country's political future to clear up before committing to MingKwai. US companies including Mergenthaler Linotype became increasingly nervous about their own typewriting patent rights, as they witnessed the possibility of the long-delayed arrival of a "Chinese alphabet." The linguistic modernity exploration then took a radical departure from the radical-stroke classification system that Chinese elites like Lin based on, the focus shifted to alternative ways of organizing Chinese characters on movable tray beds used by grassroots typists from clerks to secretaries. Mullaney elaborated, "If 'input methods' have been one of the pillars of modern Chinese information technology... the second pillar is undoubtedly that of predictive text" (Mullaney 281).
"It may come as a surprise that a technology so familiar to denizens of the digital age has deeply analog roots: predictive text was invented, popularized, and refined in the context of mechanical Chinese typewriting before the advent of computing" (Mullaney 288). In fact, the Chinese movable type had predictive qualities from its inception. The type racks in printing presses were arranged based on the frequency of character usage. Characters that were commonly used were located closer to the typesetter, while those that were less common were situated farther away. Extremely rare characters were stored in separate cabinets. The characters were arranged to their dictionary order within the sections, resulting in a logical yet inefficient method. Followed by the CCP's civil war victory and the founding of the People's Republic of China, the perpetual need for political campaigns fell on the typists’ shoulders of the typists. They were responsible for reproducing political materials from speeches to pamphlets for the reshaping of the country.
At the time, a typist could manage 20 to 30 characters per minute on average. It wasn't until Zhang Jiying, having worked as a typesetter for over a decade, was able to set the new record of 50 to 80 characters per minute, 3000 plus characters per hour. After observing his colleagues' practice of positioning frequently used characters together throughout their daily work, he invented the typesetting method of "natural-language clusters," where grouped characters together on the tray bed based on how frequently they appeared together in sentences, instead of the traditional radical-stroke method. For instance, characters of the official Chinese media New China Press — 新华社 (Xin Hua She) — are clustered together, although their radical-stroke compositions are far from each other. This approach maximized the adjacency and proximity of contextually related characters, allowing flexibility and efficiency for various political purposes and campaigns. Many other typists soon adopted this method, resulting in the standardization of terminologies and stock phrases. During the Korean War, Zhang prepared combinations like "Resist America, Aid Korea (抗美援朝)," due to its high probability of appearing. Mullaney also observed that one could trace the fluxing values of characters as they move around the type tray. For example, the character for "hair (mao)," which was once a second-tier term, gained central importance when Chairman Mao Zedong came to power. Meanwhile, due to the limited number of characters that could fit on a standard. Chinese typewriter, less commonly used characters fell out of favor.
Zhang Jiying developed a highly personal, introspective, and enigmatic connection with the dominant, official language of the time, which strengthened his ability to perform political standards. Within this framework, radical individualism was fully consistent with and supportive of state power. “Zhang set about transforming his body and his character rack into CCP’s rhetoric incarnate, not in the sense of parroting certain key terms, but in the sense that his fingers, hands, wrists, elbows, eyes, peripheral vision, joints, movements, anticipatory reflexes—every part of his body—would be intimately attuned and maximally sensitized to the distinct cadences of CCP rhetoric. (Mullaney, 295)” Such embodied experiences, shared among thousands of typists and typesetters, amount to the advancement of predictive text, which later led to word processing and early computing. Although the purpose was to optimize the production of the repetitive nature of Maoist era phraseology, each tray bed was highly personal, allowing for a more embodied, personal, and tightly fitted connection to the political ideology.
The body performs an essential part of the feedback loop, which makes it an informational medium that stores, transmits, and processes information (Hayles, 148). The relationship between the typists' bodies and the machines is undividable, aligning the body’s function with the machine’s high productivity. But the strive for efficiency, an assumed modern and capitalistic “universal” value, reduced the body to its abstract “quantitative equivalence” (Debord, 37) and alienated it from its production. As Chinese input becomes more and more sophisticated and the predictive text steadily developed, digital technologies such as autocompletion and now cloud input emerged. Cloud input relies on third-party servers, which increases the physical distance between one and their device. The feedback from the cloud input is transmitted back as plain text and used to constantly update the models, resulting in perpetual updates (Mullaney, 320). Individuals are kept from the processing and regeneration of their data, risking the body to be even more invisible during the machine’s perpetual atomization process in the digital age.
Martin Heidegger's critique of modern technology suggests that its essence is nothing technical but lies in Enframing, reducing humans' relationship to the world by reducing every being to the "standing reserve" that can be measured, calculated, and exploited. As humans become increasingly inseparable from modern technologies, Yuk Hui calls for urgency for reflection upon the practices inherited from modern technology and modernity itself to survive the Anthropocene, in his book The Question Concerning Technology in China. To interrogate the implications of technology, Hui points out the general misconception of "technology" being a universal concept, reducing all skills and products from various cultures to Western technological thought. Heidegger himself was no exception to the tendency to understand both technology and science as 'international,' in contrast to thinking which is not 'international' but unique and 'homely'" (Hui). This universalism poses great obstacles to understanding the global technological condition and especially non-European cultures, perpetuating a subtle form of colonialism.
To decolonize "technology," Hui proposes the concept of "consmotechnics," as a "conceptual tool to understand the organic unity between nature and technics," attaching importance to "the unification between the cosmic order and the moral order through technical activities'' (Hui 36). Instead of "technics" which implies Western universalism, "consmotechnics" encourages a more intersectional approach to understand the complexities behind western-dominated cultural integration. As our participation in open communicative networks becomes more and more inevitable, it becomes important to understand how our bodies are informational mediums that contribute to and co-evolve with the "complex, networked, and adaptive" environment it resides in (Hayles 149). By deciphering the Chinese typewriter in a cosmotechnical sense, maybe we could resist the danger of perpetual self-alienation, with a clearer understanding of how the technical constructs the social and vice versa.
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Work CIted
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, 1995.
Hayles, Katherine. Cybernetics. joaocamillopenna.files.wordpress.com, 2018.
Hui, Yuk. Art and Cosmotechnics. E-flux Architecture, 2020.
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. 1977.
Li, Zehou. The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition. University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu.
Liu, Lydia H. The Freudian Robot, Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious. The University of Chicago Press. 2011.
Mullaney, Thomas S. The Chinese Typewriter: A History. MIT Press, 2018.
Mullaney, Thomas S. The Moveable Typewriter: How Chinese Typists Developed Predictive Text during the Height of Maoism. 2018.
Mullaney, Thomas S. The Uncanny Keyboard. The MIT Press Reader, 2020.
Zhang, Xudong. 五四新文化的深层结构性转换—浅论白话革命的伟大意义. Guancha.cn, 2019