Thomas S. Mullaney is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University.
Incompatible with modernity -- Puzzling Chinese -- Radical machines -- What do you call a typewriter with no keys? -- Controlling the Kanjisphere -- QWERTY is dead! Long live QWERTY! Lin Yutang and the birth of input -- The typing rebellion
The Chinese Typewriter is a fascinating and extensive study into the characteristics of the Chinese language. - Ai Weiwei
China is a vast nation comprised of hundreds of distinct ethnic communities, each with its own language, history, and culture. This book recounts the history of the most sweeping attempt to sort and categorize the nation's enormous population: the 1954 Ethnic Classification project (minzu shibie).
"This book leads you to your research project while keeping your own preferences, abilities, and values centered. The authors place a strong and welcome emphasis on finding a research project that is right for you and that matters to you. The book includes student-tested exercises and many excellent examples of how-to-do-it and how-not-to. Each chapter includes "Try This Now" exercises and games designed to help you achieve a specific set of goals: generating questions, refining questions, discovering the patterns that connect the questions together, and the problem that motivates you-and other researchers. "Commonly Made Mistakes" are highlighted, as is advice for when and how to approach a "Sounding Board" (a teacher, mentor, or other advisor). At the close of each chapter, the key tools and exercises are revisited, providing a clear sense of the benchmarks you've reached"--
Technology scholars declare an emergency: attention must be paid to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems. This book sounds an alarm: we can no longer afford to be lulled into complacency by narratives of techno-utopianism, or even techno-neutrality. We should not be reassured by such soothing generalities as "human error," "virtual reality," or "the cloud." We need to realize that nothing is virtual: everything that "happens online," "virtually," or "autonomously" happens offline first, and often involves human beings whose labor is deliberately kept invisible. Everything is IRL. In Your Computer Is on Fire, technology scholars train a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.