[Ads-l] MetroLex (NYC): Thomas S. Mullaney, Oct. 16

[Ben Zimmer]

Those of you in the NYC area may be interested in attending the next
MetroLex event on Oct. 16 at Columbia. Details below -- you can use the
Eventbrite link to register.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/metrolex-the-chinese-dictionary-wars-tickets-51002950197

MetroLex: The Chinese Dictionary Wars

Tues, Oct 16, 2018, 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Hamilton Hall, Room 516
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027

The Dictionary Society of North America has partnered with local
organizations in the New York City area to establish a series of meetups
called MetroLex, bringing together lexicographers, linguists,
technologists, educators, and other language professionals to share
research and projects relating to dictionary technology, dictionary use,
language documentation, semantic ontologies, and lexicography.

Once again MetroLex will be held at Columbia University, hosted by
associate professor of English and comparative literature John H.
McWhorter. We are pleased to present Thomas S. Mullaney, associate
professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, who will speak on the
topic of The Chinese Dictionary Wars. Dr. Mullaney's latest book, The
Chinese Typewriter: A History, is now out in paperback from MIT Press and
will be available for purchase at the event. An exhibition based on his
book, "Radical Machines," will be opening on Oct. 18 at the Museum of
Chinese in America (MOCA NYC).

The event is free and open to the public -- you don't have to be a
lexicographer to attend! More information on our speaker and his topic
follows below.

* The Chinese Dictionary Wars. The relationship between lexicography and
information technology is a far more intimate one in modern China than in
many other parts of the world. While there was little direct connection
between, for instance, the compilation of A Dictionary of Modern English
Usage and the creation of either ASCII (American Standard Code for
Information Interchange) or Unicode, there was a close relationship between
the creation of certain Chinese dictionaries - particularly experimental
Chinese dictionaries and dictionary formats in the 1920s - and the later
history of modern Chinese computing. In this talk, Stanford historian
Thomas S. Mullaney examines the multiple ways in which modern Chinese
lexicography has influenced everything from the organization of Chinese
library card catalogs and telephone directories, to Chinese word
processing, computing, and machine translation. The centerpiece of the talk
will be the "Dictionary Wars" of the 1920s and 1930s, a time when dozens of
experimental Chinese dictionaries competed to displace the leading
reference work of the day, the Kangxi Dictionary, in hopes of becoming the
new standard. From there, he will show how this proliferation of
experimental dictionaries reappeared in the 1980s and 1990s, this time in
the context (and the basis) of the "Input Wars": an equally dynamic period
of proliferation in which hundreds of different Chinese input systems
(IMEs) competed to become the Human-Computer Interaction framework for all
Chinese computing, word processing, and new media.

* Thomas S. Mullaney is Associate Professor of Chinese History at Stanford
University, and holds a PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of
multiple books, the most recent being The Chinese Typewriter: A History
(MIT Press 2017). He is a 2018 Guggenheim fellow, and the recipient of the
Mellon New Directions fellowship and the National Science Foundation 3-year
fellowship, among others.

The presentation will be followed by discussion and light refreshments
provided by Cambridge University Press.

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