Keynote Speaker Announced for IUC 41

Thomas Mullaney image

      Can We Escape Alphabetic Order? Chinese I.T. Before and After Unicode

*Thomas S. Mullaney*

*Associate Professor of Chinese History, Stanford University*

Drawing upon more than a decade of research in the fields of Chinese and
Non-Western information technology, Stanford historian Tom Mullaney maps
out the parallel and still-uncharted worlds of Chinese IT. Worlds where
text encoding systems have never been hidden from the average user’s
view, but instead where they are directly manipulated,
command-line-style, by hundreds of millions of code-conscious users.
Worlds where the mythology of “plaintext” was never allowed to take
hold, and where everyone knows that ‘WYS’ is not ‘WYG’. With vivid
examples pulled from the archives of telegraphy, computing, machine
translation, digital typography, and more, he will give a guided tour of
China‘s 200-year-old quest for a stable information order, posing a
fundamental question along the way: Why has the Chinese script proven so
difficult to encode, and what does this tell us about the fundamental
inequalities that are still baked into our modern-day information order?

*About IUC 41, October 16-18, 2017:* For twenty-six years the
Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent
event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global
and multilingual software providers. Please join us for our 41st
conference! This year's event is being held on October 16-18, 2017 in
Santa Clara, California. Read more <http://www.unicodeconference.org/>.

http://blog.unicode.org/2017/08/keynote-speaker-announced-for-iuc-41.html

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