T.S. Mullaney | Reflections from 一 to 龠

Posted by Tom Mullaney on Nov 19, 2013

QWERTY IS DEAD! LONG LIVE QWERTY! Upcoming Talk at MIT on December 9

For colleagues in the Cambridge, MA area, I will be delivering a talk at MIT on December...

Posted by Tom Mullaney on Oct 29, 2013

Tomorrow’s Talk at Berkeley: Information Crisis in Twentieth-Century China

Information Crisis in Twentieth-Century China Thomas S. Mullaney, Associate Professor of History, Stanford University Wednesday, October 30, 4:00pm 3335 Dwinelle Hall More Information In the 1920s, China was perceived by many as being in a full-blown “information crisis,” with some arguing that the country should follow the path of Vietnam or Turkey and undergo a complete reform of the country’s...

Posted by Tom Mullaney on Oct 29, 2013

2013 Usher Prize for “The Moveable Typewriter”

The Society for the History of Technology has awarded Stanford historian Tom Mullaney the 2013 Usher prize for the best scholarly work published during the preceding three years under the auspices of the Society. The article is entitled “The Moveable Typewriter: How Chinese Typists Developed Predictive Text during the Height of Maoism,” and can be found in the October 2012 issue of Technology...

Posted by Tom Mullaney on May 27, 2013

Chinese Moveable Type at the Beijing Olympics: What Did It Say?

During the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics, audiences around the world bore witness to what appeared at first to be an animatronic display of oversized Chinese moveable type characters. From one moment to the next, they undulated hypnotically like the surface of a lake, only then to freeze into discernible shapes and configurations, such as the character he (和), meaning “harmony.” Quite...

Posted by Tom Mullaney on May 22, 2013

Tchotchkes and 3D Printers – What Gives?

Count me in: I am entranced by 3D printing. When future historians reflect upon the 21st century, the invention and consumerization of 3D printing (not to mention the still unforeseen ripples thereof) will, I’m convinced, be identified as an active ingredient in the formation of a new epoch, whatever that epoch might be. The nagging question I can’t stifle, though, is: if we are already...

Posted by Tom Mullaney on May 13, 2013

New review of “Critical Han Studies”

Alison Groppe of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon has published a review of Critical Han Studies in a recent issue of Asian...

Posted by Tom Mullaney on May 10, 2013

Desperately Seeking IBM’s Eugen Buhler and Chris Berry

In 1946, two engineers at IBM – Eugen Buhler and Christopher A. Berry – filed a patent entitled “Machine Adapted for Typing Chinese Ideographs.” This machine was based upon the design of a Chinese inventor, Gao Zhongqin, who worked closely with IBM for the greater part of the 1940s. Whereas I’ve found an abundance of materials on Gao, I have found scarcely anything (except...