imperialism and technology for typography

[cathschmidt]

I'd like to write an essay about imperialism, typography, and technology (or, technologies for typography).

Here's an outline:

1. In ​Imagined Communities​ Benedict Anderson theorizes that codification of vernacular languages in Europe (French, Spanish, German, Czech etc) due to the printing press ushered in the modern European nation-state. The printing press disseminated and standardized European vernacular languages. Once people could belong to a language group, they could imagine themselves as a nation-state.
2. In the introduction to his ​Print Areas​, Abhijit Gupta wonders what the printing press means to cultures for whom it was a colonial imposition. For colonized cultures, the (western) printing press was a foreign technology used to rule.
3. Moveable type as conceived by Gutenberg—the most widely used, though not the first printing technology—requires writing systems to behave in discrete parts, like an alphabet. Gutenberg's system makes some demands: that your characters not touch each other, that they don't change based on their neighbors, and that there aren't too many of them. Many of the world's writing systems do not meet these criteria. If any one of these demands aren't met, the system becomes cumbersome.
4. Still, renaissance and enlightenment orientalists, whether tasked by the crown or the church, quickly started to adapt writing systems moveable type. The early adaptations were clumsy at best, especially for scripts with robust calligraphic traditions.

5. In the case of Devanagari (the script that you use to write Hindi, Sanskrit, and a few other languages), in 1791 (I need to check this...), the East India Company tasked Charles Wilkins, a Sanskritist, with creating metal types for the script. The intentions of the East India Company were clear: typography was a tool to rule. In a preface to a Bengali grammar (for which Wilkins had also designed the types), Nathaniel Halhed writes:

   The English, who have made so capital a progress in the Polite Arts, and who are masters of Bengal, may, with more ease and greater propriety, add its language to their acquisitions: that they may explain the benevolent principles of that legislation whose decrees they enforce; that they may convince where they command; and be at once the dispensers of Laws and Science to an extensive nation.

6. In colonial India, to produce typography was expensive and time consuming. The metal—and, with character sets often over 1,000 glyphs, Devanagari required a lot of metal—was also heavy, making it hard to transport. Initially, only colonists could afford to buy and make movable type. Too, unlike in Europe, Indian publishers would like to print in multiple writing systems. During the early 19th century publishers would hire a calligrapher to work on a litho stone, bypassing the typographic system altogether.
7. By the end of the 19th century Indians made their own beautiful types for letterpress. But no matter how gorgeous the form of the type, the mechanics of Devanagari were altered. —matra placement, hanging half-forms, not enough samyukta/conjunct consonants
8. Character sets shrank in the 20th century as hot metal printing technologies made typesetting Devanagari even more challenging. After partition, the government started to consider "script reform". Language of modernization/progress applied to the writing system, as though it were backward.
9. Text rendering—essentially typesetting—on computers follows Gutenberg's system. Conceived in the west, the system was built for a writing system with a small character count and discrete, immutable letters. Original character encoding systems like ASCII only allowed for 128 characters.
10. Though Unicode and OpenType fonts allow for "difficult" scripts like Devanagari and Naskh to be rendered more or less correctly onscreen, computers are built on a similar imperial paradigm. This technology, like Gutenberg's, is built with the latin script in mind. Many of the world's languages, some written and spoken by hundreds of millions of people, are seen as something to be adapted to the system.
11. In this paradigm, speakers of languages with non-Latin writing systems are beholden to Western software companies to "support" the rendering of their languages. If the software company can't find a financial incentive to support a writing system, they won't.
12. Until large, often American software companies build solutions for complex scripts, local governments will sometimes fix the gap with proprietary software or encoding standards. (These solutions include input systems like keyboards too). As is the case in India, this can delay the adoption of universal standards.
13. Writers of complex writing systems find ways to subvert this imperialism. In contemporary culture, hand-writing is no longer an option. Our words are almost always mediated through typography (when was the last time you read a friend's hand-written note?). Writers of complex writing systems might: take screenshots of text composed in proprietary language-friendly software take photos of written text use romanized spellings; that is, transliterate the language into the Latin alphabet
14. The latter is the most scary prospect. Anderson posits that cultures were built from the printing press; perhaps others are destroyed.

[thisischrisswift]

I wonder if Anderson is confusing the idea of the nation with the idea of a culture?

[davelab6]

A nation is a culture. I think you are confusing nations with states.

[g-a-v-i-n]

@davelab6 elaborate please

[cathschmidt]

@davelab6 @thisischrisswift paraphrasing Anderson here and oversimplifying his point. Good to know about the confusion though. Will be careful here.

[morgane]

Let's not nitpick the details of an outline plz

[davelab6]

Nations are geographic cultures:

Belgium is a state that spans 2 nations, the Flemish and the Walloon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_Belgium#Regional_demographics

North America has 3 federal states and 11 nations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/which-of-the-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in/

[cathschmidt]

@davelab6 Specifically am referring Anderson's definition of nation as imagined community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community#Nation_as_an_imagined_community. The nations of Europe needed to be imagined as nations before they could be formalized as modern states (as opposed to the colonized nation —>state). As an American, I am familiar with stateless nations from where I grew up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samish_Indian_Nation ;)

[davelab6]

I concur

[litherland]

I'd like to write an essay

This is a book. Publish that shit.