The Chinese Type Archive: Building Community and Discourse through Cataloguing and Translation
Description
This presentation will address the theme of Hybridity and more specifically, Transcultural Practices by presenting how the bilingual, online archive, the Chinese Type Archive, was conceived, built, and continues to be developed as a way to bridge and enhance typographic cultures. As universities grapple with reorienting their curricula within a globalized context and as designers struggle to work across cultural boundaries, the Chinese Type Archive serves as a vital bridge to bring together both Western and Chinese typographic traditions through the translation of Chinese typographic terms and the highlighting of relationships equivalent and not equivalent with Western typography. Uniquely, the project was conceived for designers who work across cultural contexts and as an open, online archive, was built with the collaboration of volunteers. Beyond immediately addressing the domain of Chinese typography, the Chinese Type Archive serves as a model for collective learning and sharing of cultural knowledge through the use of digital networks.
Takeaway
The presentation will encourage conversation and dialogue among educators about the importance of digital archives within the domains of graphic design and typography and how such repositories could be built to enhance cross-cultural understanding of different design/typographic traditions: in this case, Chinese typography. In addition, attendees will consider, through a presentation on the process of developing the Chinese Type Archive, how techniques to provide digitally stable reference points while allowing for the evolution and development of definitions and meaning enable online archives to become a flexible and robust way of building collaborative knowledge-sharing communities that can enhance learning. Finally, attendees will be asked to consider how translation can be used to support more robust multilingual projects, cross-cultural design experimentation, and expanded conceptual frameworks for graphic and typographic design.
Abstract
The development of graphic design as a discipline is uniquely tied to the development of typography and typographic discourse. This is predicated on a corpus of typographic reference points that serve as common denominators used for teaching, research, and praxis. For Western typography, collections dedicated to housing specimens such as the Letterform Archive in San Francisco, the Herb Lubalin Center for Typography in New York, or St. Bride Foundation in London act as repositories for visual form while countless books provide access points to the basic terminology and theory of typography. In fact, the awareness of Western typography has reached such a height that the general public is mildly aware of its significance.
In the case of Chinese typography, the origins, major actors, themes, and basic concepts are ill-defined or difficult to access for both Chinese and non-Chinese designers. It is only in the last decade that groups within China and the Chinese diaspora have begun to raise awareness of typography as a discipline. One of the biggest challenges facing designers who work with Chinese type is the lack of a common conceptual framework and correspondingly, a lack of common reference points. The primary effect of these challenges is a significant lacuna in the critical discourse about the visual forms of Chinese type and how these forms interact in a globalized design setting.
As a starting point to address these challenges, the Chinese Type Archive was conceived as an open, online, bilingual repository of Chinese typographic materials. Currently, no such online resource exists. Many online resources are in blog formats and print resources are notoriously difficult to find. Furthermore, translations are scarce. The Chinese Type Archive compiles and catalogs resources related to Chinese typography by developing descriptors for concepts, typefaces, and resources and provides points of entry through translating synonyms and terms, highlighting relationships to Western typography, and providing direct links to online catalogs like WorldCat.
Uniquely, the Archive assigns identifiers for concepts, typefaces, and resources. By serving as the beginnings of a controlled vocabulary, the identifiers act as stable reference points as definitions and synonyms continue to change in real-time and names for typefaces are discovered. One of the most exciting aspects of Chinese typography is that the vocabulary used to describe type has been developing and shifting over the last decade. In addition, many historic Chinese typefaces have no names which make it difficult for designers to refer to them precisely.
After months of prototyping and development, the first purpose-built version of the Chinese Type Archive was released at the beginning of this year with a seed collection. As it enters the next phase and continues to grow, additional materials and relevant visual resources will be collected and made accessible. More importantly, designers have for the first time, a centralized resource for Chinese typography. Moreover, cross-cultural connections between Western and Chinese typography can be made so that Chinese typography can enter into a global design discourse and expand our collective understanding of graphic design.