[SIGCIS-Members] query: history of character codes, Unicode?

[Jacob Gaboury]

For those interested in the standardization of ASCII I would recommend
the *Computer
Standards Collection, 1958-1979* at the National Museum of American
History. The collection was donated by Robert "Bob" Bemer, who is sometimes
referred to as the father of ASCII. I looked through it a number of years
ago, and while it wasn't relevant to my own project there was a lot there
to work with. It deals not only with the standardization of ASCII but also
with the work of the International Standards Organization subcommittee,
which dealt with precisely the kinds of questions discussed here. I imagine
Eric Hintz from the Lemelson center would be a useful resource for anyone
who wants to follow up, and he is also member of this list <hintze at si.edu>.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Bemer
http://siris-archives.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?&profile=all&source=~!siarchives&uri=full=3100001~!140356~!0#focus

_Jacob


Jacob Gaboury
--
Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Visual Culture
Dept. of Cultural Analysis and Theory, Stony Brook University
--
Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Dept II)
Berlin, Germany 2015 - 2016
--
Staff Writer, Rhizome.org
New Museum for Contemporary Art
--
http://www.jacobgaboury.com/

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 2:02 PM, James Sumner <james.sumner at manchester.ac.uk
> wrote:

> Hi Paul and everyone
>
> More a survey of concerns than a historical study, but:
>
> Daniel Pargman and Jacob Palme, "ASCII imperialism". In Martha Lampland
> and Susan Leigh Star (eds.), *Standards and their stories: How
> quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday life*,
> pp.177-199. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. PDF copy at
> <http://danielpargman.blogspot.co.uk/p/texts.html>
> <http://danielpargman.blogspot.co.uk/p/texts.html>
>
> (Searching on the term "ASCII imperialism", incidentally, turns up a 1999
> text suggesting it was first coined by the Finnish library/information
> activist Mikael Böök -- who is himself uncommonly difficult to search on
> precisely because of the ASCII problem...)
>
> Best
> James
>
>
> On 20/08/2015 16:00, Paul N.Edwards wrote:
>
> All, vaguely related to the interesting discussion of race - on which I
> tend to agree with Tom H - here’s something that’s been niggling away at my
> historical consciousness.
>
> In 1993 Jeffrey Shapard published an intriguing article about the problems
> created by early standardization on ASCII 7- and 8-bit character codes for
> Asian and other non-alphabetic languages, which can have many thousands of
> characters (vs. the 256 representable in 8-bit ASCII). Shapard, “Islands in
> the (Data) Stream: Language, Character Codes, and Electronic Isolation in
> Japan,” in Linda Harasim, ed., *Global networks: Computers and
> international communication* (MIT Press Cambridge, MA., 1993).
>
> This problem carried over into the Web era. It was technically resolved by
> Unicode, but that standard has still not been universally adopted.
>
> I’m wondering whether any historians have written about the history of
> character encoding, especially Unicode. What I’m curious about is not the
> technical history itself, but how the character-code problem affected/was
> affected by culture (“electronic isolation," as per Shapard? indigenous
> efforts, vs. IBM’s world-market goals? alternative pathways?). Do any of
> you know archive- or interview-based accounts that go into some of the
> cultural and social background and implications?
>
> NB, there was a 3-part history of IBM's efforts in Asia, especially kanji
> representations, in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Jan.-March
> 2005, by: Hensch, K.; Iqi, T.; Iwao, M.; Oda, A.; Takeshita.
>
> There are also number of rather thorough and interesting histories by
> developer-protagonists and users, such as these:
>
> S. Searle, A Brief History of Character Codes in North America, Europe,
> and Asia <http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html>
>
> S. Searle, Unicode Revisited
> <http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/unicoderevisited.html>
>
> J. Becker, Unicode 88 <http://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf> (1988
> proposal from Xerox PARC)
>
> Curious for any thoughts or references.
>
> Best,
>
> Paul
>
>
> —————————————————
> Paul N. Edwards, Professor of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu> and
> History <http://www.lsa.umich.edu/history/>
> On sabbatical July-December 2015 — replies will be slow or nonexistent
>
> Terse replies are deliberate <http://five.sentenc.es/>. Here's why!
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>
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