Typescript, etc. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Typescript, etc. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Typescript, etc. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This dissertation examines the modern Chinese script crisis in twentieth-century China. It situates the Chinese script crisis within the modern phenomenon of phonocentrism - the systematic privileging of speech over writing. It depicts the Chinese experience as an integral part of a worldwide crisis of non-alphabetic scripts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It places the crisis of Chinese characters at the center of the making of modern Chinese language, literature, and culture. It investigates how the script crisis and the ensuing script revolution intersect with significant historical processes such as the Chinese engagement in the two World Wars, national and international education movements, the Communist revolution, and national salvation. Since the late nineteenth century, the Chinese writing system began to be targeted as the roadblock to literacy, science and democracy. Chinese and foreign scholars took the abolition of Chinese script to be the condition of modernity. A script revolution was launched as the Chinese response to the script crisis. This dissertation traces the beginning of the crisis to 1916, when Chao Yuen Ren published his English article "The Problem of the Chinese Language," sweeping away all theoretical oppositions to alphabetizing the Chinese script. This was followed by two major movements dedicated to the task of eradicating Chinese characters: First, the Chinese Romanization Movement spearheaded by a group of Chinese and international scholars which was quickly endorsed by the Guomingdang (GMD) Nationalist government in the 1920s; Second, the dissident Chinese Latinization Movement initiated in the Soviet Union and championed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 1930s. This crisis was brought to an abrupt end in 1958, when Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People's Republic of China, relegated the Romanization system pinyin to an official auxiliary status, secondary to Chinese characters, thus concluding the half-century struggle between the Chinese script and the alphabet. The final containment of the script crisis was partly a political decision of the new socialist state, and partly the result of the use of "baihua." The multivalent term baihua--plain speech, vernacular, and a colloquialized written language--enabled an unlikely reconciliation between the phonocentric dreams of a Chinese alphabet and a character-based Chinese national language and literature. This alternative solution to the script crisis, which grew from within the Chinese script, was rehearsed in the first modern Chinese anti-illiteracy program in France during the Great War. The solution was consolidated as a colloquialized written Chinese became the staple of modern Chinese literary writing. The negotiated baihua--imprinted profoundly by the phonocentric-biased discourse- on the one hand registers the historical reality of the modern Chinese writing as a written language; on the other, it keeps alive the phonocentric dreams of modern China.

This dissertation explores the global history of Chinese script reforms—the effort to phoneticize Chinese language and/or simplify the writing system—from its inception in the 1890s to its demise in the 1980s. These reforms took place at the intersection of industrialization, colonialism, and new information technologies, such as alphabet-based telegraphy and breakthroughs in printing technologies. As these social and technological transformations put unprecedented pressure on knowledge management and the use of mental and clerical labor, many Chinese intellectuals claimed that learning Chinese characters consumed too much time and mental energy. Chinese script reforms, this dissertation argues, were an effort to increase speed in producing, transmitting, and accessing information, and thus meet the demands of the industrializing knowledge economy. The industrializing knowledge economy that this dissertation explores was built on and sustained by a psychological understanding of the human subject as a knowledge machine, and it was part of a global moment in which the optimization of labor in knowledge production was a key concern for all modernizing economies. While Chinese intellectuals were inventing new signs of inscription, American behavioral psychologists, Soviet psycho-economists, and Central Asian and Ottoman technicians were all experimenting with new scripts in order to increase mental efficiency and productivity. This dissertation reveals the intimate connections between the Chinese and non-Chinese script engineering projects that were taking place synchronically across the world. The chapters of this work demonstrate for the first time, for instance, that the simplification of Chinese characters in the 1920s and 1930s was intimately connected to the discipline of behavioral psychology in the US. The first generation of Chinese psychologists employed the American psychologists’ methods to track eye movements, count word-frequencies, and statistically analyze the speed of reading, writing, and memorizing in order to simplify and “rationalize” the Chinese writing system in an effort to discipline and optimize mental labor. Other chapters explore the issue of mental and clerical optimization by finding the origins of the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), the mother of pinyin, in hitherto unknown Eurasian connections. The CLA, the pages of this work shows, was the product of a transnational exchange that involved Ottoman and Transcaucasian typographers as well as Russian engineers and Chinese communists who sought efficiency in knowledge production through inventing new scripts. Situating the Chinese script reforms at this global intersection of psychology, economy, and linguistics, this dissertation examines the global connections and forces that turned the human subject into a knowledge worker who was cognitively managed through education, literacy, propaganda, and other measures of organizing information, all of which had the script at the center. The search for efficiency and productivity—the core values of industrialism—lay at the heart of script reforms in China, but this search was inseparable from linguistic orders and political ambitions. Even if writing, transmitting, and learning a phonetic script could theoretically be easier and more efficient than the Chinese characters, the alphabet opened a veritable Pandora’s Box around the issue of selection: given the complex linguistic landscape in China, which speech was a phonetic script supposed to represent? There were myriad languages spoken throughout the empire and the subsequent nation-state, most of which were mutually incomprehensible. Mandarin as spoken in Beijing was different from that spoken in the south, and “topolects” or regional languages such as Min or Cantonese were to Mandarin what Romanian is to English. As a linguistic life-or-death issue, phonetic scripts stood for the infrastructural possibilities and limitations in the representation of speeches. Some scripts, such as Lao Naixuan’s phonetic script composed of more than a hundred signs, were capable of representing multiple Mandarin and non-Mandarin speeches; whereas others, such as Phonetic Symbols that only has thirty-seven syllabic signs, represented only one speech, i.e., Mandarin. Using Mandarin-oriented scripts to transcribe non-Mandarin speeches was like writing English with fifteen letters, hence the acrimonious disputes that fill the pages of this dissertation. Succinctly put, it was at the level of script invention that Chinese and non-Chinese actors engineered different infrastructures not only for laboring minds but also for the social world of Chinese languages. The history of information technologies and knowledge economy in China was thus inseparable from the world of speech and language, as each script offered a new potential to reassemble the written matter and the speaking mind in a different way. “Codes of Modernity” thus conceptualizes the script itself as an infrastructural medium. A script was not merely a passive carrier of information, but an existential artifact. Building on an expanding literature on infrastructures, it endorses the observation that infrastructures, technologies, and the social world around them work in a recursive loop. An infrastructure is not just the physical object that permits the flow of information, goods, ideas, and people, but a sociotechnical product that enables the experience of culture, while imposing constrains on it at the same time. Like electricity grids, transportation systems, and sewage canals, the experience of scripts as infrastructures is the experience of thought worlds. After a long tradition of structuralism and poststructuralism that sought to understand the world through the semiotic prism of language, “Codes of Modernity” argues that it is time for an infrastructuralism that excavates the indispensable media that enable the production of language and thought.

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abstract: The purpose of this study is to explore the shifting cultural norms of copyright law, and that concept’s impact on the performance and practice of artists producing original works of authorship. Although related concepts predate it, and today it exists as a subset of a broader category known as intellectual property, the purpose of copyright beginning with the United States Constitution was to allow for a temporary economic monopoly to an author of a fixed creative work. This monopoly was meant to incentivize authors to contribute to the public good with works that promote progress in science and art. However, increases over time in the scope and duration of copyright terms grant broader protections and controls for copyright owners today, while advances in technology have provided the public with the potential for near-limitless low-cost access to information. This creates a conflict between proprietary interest in creative works and the public’s right and ability to access and build on those works. The history of copyright law in America is rife with efforts to balance these competing interests. The methodology for this study consisted of flexible strategies for collecting and analyzing data, primarily elite, semi-structured interviews with professional artists, attorneys, and others who engage with the cultural and legal norms of intellectual property regimes on a regular basis. Constant comparative analysis was used to maintain an emic perspective, prioritizing the subjective experience of individuals interviewed for this research project. Additional methods for qualitative analysis were also employed here to code and categorize gathered data, including the use of RQDA, a software package for Qualitative Data Analysis that runs within the R statistical software program. Various patterns and behaviors relevant to intellectual property reforms as they relate to artist practices were discussed in detail following the analysis of findings, in an effort to describe how cultural norms of copyright intersect with the creation of original works of authorship, and towards the development of the theory that the semiotic sign systems subject to intellectual property laws are not themselves forms of real property, as they do not meet the categorical requirements of scarce resources. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Journalism and Mass Communication 2018

The study is aimed to map the gestures of Non Player Characters to make it easier for developers in the future to find fitting gestures for their characters to make sure they retain their believability. By making a survey with open questions and animations of the different gestures, the respondents were asked what they thought the characters in the animation wanted to convey. By counting how many times the respondents used the same, or similar words, each question were summarized into a table. The results were that many of the gestures that were used to convey a feeling, were better suited to another type of gesture, and by mapping these the goal is to create a lexikon with gestures that makes it easier for future developers to apply the correct gesture in the right situation. / Studien avser att kartlägga gesterna hos Non Player Characters för att underlätta för framtida utvecklare att hitta passade gester för olika situationer som gör att karaktärerna i spelet bibehåller sin trovärdighet. Genom att formulera en enkät med öppna frågor och animeringar för att gestalta gesterna tillfrågades respondenterna vad de trodde att karaktären försökte förmedla. Genom att räkna hur många gånger respondenterna valde att beskriva gesterna i enkäten med samma eller liknande ord, sammanfattades varje fråga i en tabell. Resultatet blev att många gester som används i vissa syften passar bättre för att gestalta andra typer av känslor, och genom att kartlägga dessa gester är syftet att bygga upp ett lexikon med gester som utvecklare i framtiden kan använda för att applicera rätt typ av gest i rätt situation.

Inheritance of many characters in barley has been studied, and two or more genes have been located in each of the seven pairs of chromosomes. Studies of the mode of inheritance of these characters will aid plant breeders materially in working with plants of diverse genetic make-up. Hybridization followed by selection and testing can improve present varieties by replacing them with new ones having more desirable characters. Barley (Hordeum sp._ is one of the few species of plants widely distributed which is well adapted to genetical analysis. This plant has a lower number of chromosomes, complete self fertility, and a wealth of easily classifiable, hereditary characters. This study represents the data obtained in an investigation of ten characters in barley in the F2 and F3 generations. The nature of the inheritance, genes involved, and possible linkages have been determined.

Due to the commercial importance of barley many hybridization studies have been prosecuted in an effort to produce superior economic strains. While the economic breeding is still important, at present there is considerable scientific interest int he inheritance of the characters and in the location of the genes in the different linkage groups. Barley is rather favorable genetic material for such study. There is a great number of cultivated varieties and strains which differ widely in heritable characters. Barley can be grown under a wide range of climatic conditions and will produce rather large F2 families. The fact that it has only seven chromosomes makes linkage studies more feasible than in wheat or oats with their greater chromosome complements. The characters studied in this paper are: black versus white glume color, long haired versus short haired rachilla, rough versus smooth awns, and branched versus unbranched style.