query: history of character codes, Unicode?
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! <http://emailcharter.org/> University of Michigan School of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu/> 4437 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 Twitter: @AVastMachine <https://twitter.com/avastmachine> Web: pne.people.si.umich.edu <http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/>
Hello Paul and SIGCIS, I'm excited to see interest in the topic of character encoding. I explored some related trailheads in my dissertation work on dial-up BBSs. Specifically, I wanted to better understand the expressive use of semigraphical characters in the construction of online interfaces. This lead me to examine various vendor-specific character sets such as Commodore's PETSCII, Atari's ATASCII, and Microsoft's Code Page 437 (stored in ANSI.SYS). Unicode wasn't quite on the scene yet. As with so many interesting side-quests, only bits of this research made it into the final document (see: "Text, terminal, and the visual culture of BBSing", pg 176-196, in the PDF linked below) but I am looking forward to learning more about this area--especially given the recent diffusion of "emoji" and other pictographic Unicode characters. http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15799coll3/id/4... 📳 📩 📫 Kevin Driscoll Postdoctoral researcher Microsoft Research New England On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 11:00 AM, Paul N. Edwards <pne@umich.edu> 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! <http://emailcharter.org>
University of Michigan School of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu/> 4437 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 Twitter: @AVastMachine <https://twitter.com/avastmachine> Web: pne.people.si.umich.edu
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
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> (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! <http://emailcharter.org>
University of Michigan School of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu/> 4437 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 Twitter: @AVastMachine <https://twitter.com/avastmachine> Web: pne.people.si.umich.edu <http://pne.people.si.umich.edu>
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
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@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@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! <http://emailcharter.org>
University of Michigan School of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu/> 4437 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 Twitter: @AVastMachine <https://twitter.com/avastmachine> Web: pne.people.si.umich.edu
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
If you want to understand standards you to look at how the committees established in many different ways were formed to try and get companies needing a common standard to agree on what a new standard should be for things like codes, pins on plugs, etc every member of the committee is trying to get a standard that is useful for what they want for the company without letting the other members know what new development they were going release that needed the standard. there was also a lot of conflicts and downright angers in the process. For example Herb Grosch) who was with the national bureau of standards turned down IBM's proposal for a new punch card standard and even three years later when i joined Herb and some others for dinner at a restaurant during and ACM yearly meeting, when we walked into the restaurant a table of IBM professionals let out a loud BOO. Herb actually worked for a time at IBM in his early professional days in the US and was allowed to wear a beard because they wanted him to stay. Herb later on was also a president of ACM. One of the experimental groups we had on the NSF sponsored EIES system was a standards group that wanted to try to arrive at standards where everything in the discussion was anonymous so you could not identify the participants company. If you don't know eies you should look at the book "the network nation: human communication via computer" hiltz and turoff, 1978 and reprinted by mit press in 1993 and still available. The great thing about eies (Electronic Information Exchange System) is we designed so we could give any user group a tailored communication structure to meet their need. all inside a system that had much more in group communications than todays social networks. A lot of the early research reports of the EIES efforts are available free from the NJIT library. The link to this set of reports and associated user manuals even for the earlier system EMISARI in the US government in 1971 is on there. it had chat among other things. http://library.njit.edu/archives/cccc-materials/index.php we did a lot of the early experiments on online group communications which seem to be largely forgotten today. On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 7:23 PM, Jacob Gaboury <jacob.gaboury@stonybrook.edu
wrote:
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@si.edu
.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Bemer
_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@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! <http://emailcharter.org>
University of Michigan School of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu/> 4437 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 Twitter: @AVastMachine <https://twitter.com/avastmachine> Web: pne.people.si.umich.edu
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
-- *please send messages to murray.turoff@gmail.com <murray.turoff@gmail.com> do not use @njit.edu <http://njit.edu> addressDistinguished Professor EmeritusInformation Systems, NJIThomepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff <http://is.njit.edu/turoff>*
Dear all, I hope this is not too off topic, but I have been meaning to ask for a while now (after dabbling through some literature in vain) if anyone can point me to work on the invention, development, or emergence of the concept of the string. For an article I am developing I need to know why and how this linear structure arose. Is this simply a result of how the Turing machine was conceived? I bet there's more to it? Thanks, and all the best --Joris On vr 21 aug. 2015 at 02:29 Murray Turoff <murray.turoff@gmail.com> wrote:
If you want to understand standards you to look at how the committees established in many different ways were formed to try and get companies needing a common standard to agree on what a new standard should be for things like codes, pins on plugs, etc every member of the committee is trying to get a standard that is useful for what they want for the company without letting the other members know what new development they were going release that needed the standard. there was also a lot of conflicts and downright angers in the process. For example Herb Grosch) who was with the national bureau of standards turned down IBM's proposal for a new punch card standard and even three years later when i joined Herb and some others for dinner at a restaurant during and ACM yearly meeting, when we walked into the restaurant a table of IBM professionals let out a loud BOO. Herb actually worked for a time at IBM in his early professional days in the US and was allowed to wear a beard because they wanted him to stay. Herb later on was also a president of ACM. One of the experimental groups we had on the NSF sponsored EIES system was a standards group that wanted to try to arrive at standards where everything in the discussion was anonymous so you could not identify the participants company. If you don't know eies you should look at the book "the network nation: human communication via computer" hiltz and turoff, 1978 and reprinted by mit press in 1993 and still available. The great thing about eies (Electronic Information Exchange System) is we designed so we could give any user group a tailored communication structure to meet their need. all inside a system that had much more in group communications than todays social networks. A lot of the early research reports of the EIES efforts are available free from the NJIT library. The link to this set of reports and associated user manuals even for the earlier system EMISARI in the US government in 1971 is on there. it had chat among other things. http://library.njit.edu/archives/cccc-materials/index.php we did a lot of the early experiments on online group communications which seem to be largely forgotten today.
On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 7:23 PM, Jacob Gaboury < jacob.gaboury@stonybrook.edu> wrote:
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@si.edu>.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Bemer
_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@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! <http://emailcharter.org>
University of Michigan School of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu/> 4437 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 Twitter: @AVastMachine <https://twitter.com/avastmachine> Web: pne.people.si.umich.edu
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
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*please send messages to murray.turoff@gmail.com <murray.turoff@gmail.com> do not use @njit.edu <http://njit.edu> addressDistinguished Professor EmeritusInformation Systems, NJIThomepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff <http://is.njit.edu/turoff>* _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
Joris van Zundert <joris.van.zundert@huygens.knaw.nl> writes:
I have been meaning to ask for a while now (after dabbling through some literature in vain) if anyone can point me to work on the invention, development, or emergence of the concept of the string.
I dug into this a bit some time ago, mostly focused on trying to trace how the word "string" came to be ubiquitous in this context, to mean something like "textual data type". One line of influence is fairly easy to trace. In work on formal languages (predating electronic computers), "string" was used with roughly its normal English meaning in phrases such as "string of symbols", interchangeably with similar ones like "sequence of symbols". This work develops through the '50s and '60s in a pretty direct line into the theory of formal grammars, and a whole host of algorithms for doing various kinds of matching and processing on strings of symbols (string parsing, string matching, string edit-distance, etc.), with strings of character symbols usually being the most important special case. What's less clear to me is whether this is the only, or main, line of development of the concept. There are also early uses of textual data that at least in principle don't seem particularly connected to formal-language theory, such as the text data fields in IBM's batch-processing machines. Was the basic idea of just storing and processing text on a computer *always* closely linked with the formal-language concept of a string, and algorithmic work on string-processing? From just reading things written in the '50s on text processing (which seems to be the key period in this regard) the path of influences there isn't entirely clear. I haven't found useful secondary literature on that subject either, though I'd love pointers to it if it exists. -Mark -- Mark J. Nelson Anadrome Research http://www.kmjn.org
Well, there was SNOBOL, which was a lanugage built up entirely out of the concept of the string. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL>. Paul ________________________________________ From: Members [members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] on behalf of Mark J. Nelson [mjn@anadrome.org] Sent: Friday, August 21, 2015 2:31 PM To: members@lists.sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] query: history of character codes, Unicode? Joris van Zundert <joris.van.zundert@huygens.knaw.nl> writes:
I have been meaning to ask for a while now (after dabbling through some literature in vain) if anyone can point me to work on the invention, development, or emergence of the concept of the string.
I dug into this a bit some time ago, mostly focused on trying to trace how the word "string" came to be ubiquitous in this context, to mean something like "textual data type". One line of influence is fairly easy to trace. In work on formal languages (predating electronic computers), "string" was used with roughly its normal English meaning in phrases such as "string of symbols", interchangeably with similar ones like "sequence of symbols". This work develops through the '50s and '60s in a pretty direct line into the theory of formal grammars, and a whole host of algorithms for doing various kinds of matching and processing on strings of symbols (string parsing, string matching, string edit-distance, etc.), with strings of character symbols usually being the most important special case. What's less clear to me is whether this is the only, or main, line of development of the concept. There are also early uses of textual data that at least in principle don't seem particularly connected to formal-language theory, such as the text data fields in IBM's batch-processing machines. Was the basic idea of just storing and processing text on a computer *always* closely linked with the formal-language concept of a string, and algorithmic work on string-processing? From just reading things written in the '50s on text processing (which seems to be the key period in this regard) the path of influences there isn't entirely clear. I haven't found useful secondary literature on that subject either, though I'd love pointers to it if it exists. -Mark -- Mark J. Nelson Anadrome Research http://www.kmjn.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
participants (8)
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Ceruzzi, Paul -
Jacob Gaboury -
James Sumner -
Joris van Zundert -
Kevin Driscoll -
Mark J. Nelson -
Murray Turoff -
Paul N. Edwards