Announcing Internationalization & Unicode Conference #45 Keynote Speaker Gretchen McCulloch

Taking Playfulness Seriously—When character sets are used in unexpected ways

HEEEEELLLLLLOOOO friends of Unicode! HaVE yoU HEard? 🚨🚨This year’s keynote speaker is Gretchen McCulloch, internet linguist and bestselling author of the 2019 book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. ✍️ You ✍️ may ✍️ also ✍️ know ✍️ Gretchen ✍️ from ✍️ her ✍️ column ✍️ about ✍️ internet ✍️ language ✍️ in ✍️ WIRED. If you aren’t familiar withGretchen’s book it includes great insights of how language and technology evolves! Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear from her in person. (♥ω♥*)

Her talk, “Taking Playfulness Seriously—When character sets are used in unexpected ways,” explores those trailblazing language disrupters, who aren’t checking out the Oxford English dictionary or asking themselves, “What would my college English prof do about this comma?” You know who you are! 👀 She’ll discuss all the creative ways real-life netizens playfully create ASCII art out of text or combine emoji to convey new meanings, as well as the problems that arise when these kinds of creative uses clash with technical tools behind the scenes that aren’t expecting the unexpected—and what some solutions might look like.

In addition to Gretchen McCulloch, the conference offers Unicode tutorials, talks and panels on internationalization, web design, emoji, indigenous languages, historical scripts, and more. Of course, the conference also includes plenty of networking opportunities, as well as a special celebration of the Unicode Consortium’s 30th anniversary!

See What’s Happening at IUC 45

For thirty years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. Join us in Santa Clara to promote your ideas and experiences working with natural languages, multicultural user interfaces, producing and supporting multinational and multilingual products, linguistic algorithms, applying internationalization across mobile and social media platforms, or advancements in relevant standards.

Join expert practitioners and industry leaders as they present detailed recommendations for businesses looking to expand to new international markets and those seeking to improve time to market and cost-efficiency of supporting existing markets. Recent conferences have provided specific advice on designing software for European countries, Latin America, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and emerging markets.

Join us for the Internationalization & Unicode Conference 45, October 13-15, 2021, Santa Clara, California. To register and learn more, please visit the Internationalization & Unicode Conference website. Object Management Group®, (OMG®) organizes the Internationalization and Unicode Conferences around the world under an exclusive license granted by the Unicode Consortium.

Keynote Speaker Announced for IUC 41

Can We Escape Alphabetic Order? Chinese I.T. Before and After Unicode

Thomas S. Mullaney
Associate Professor of Chinese History, Stanford University

Drawing upon more than a decade of research in the fields of Chinese and Non-Western information technology, Stanford historian Tom Mullaney maps out the parallel and still-uncharted worlds of Chinese IT. Worlds where text encoding systems have never been hidden from the average user’s view, but instead where they are directly manipulated, command-line-style, by hundreds of millions of code-conscious users. Worlds where the mythology of “plaintext” was never allowed to take hold, and where everyone knows that ‘WYS’ is not ‘WYG’. With vivid examples pulled from the archives of telegraphy, computing, machine translation, digital typography, and more, he will give a guided tour of China‘s 200-year-old quest for a stable information order, posing a fundamental question along the way: Why has the Chinese script proven so difficult to encode, and what does this tell us about the fundamental inequalities that are still baked into our modern-day information order?

About IUC 41, October 16-18, 2017: For twenty-six years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. Please join us for our 41st conference! This year's event is being held on October 16-18, 2017 in Santa Clara, California. Read more.

IUC 38 Keynote Presenter Announced

KEYNOTE PRESENTER ANNOUNCED!

Dr. Mark Davis  Unicode President and Co-Founder

The Unicode Consortium has announced that its president and co-founder, Dr. Mark Davis, will deliver the keynote address at this year’s Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC), November 3-5. Dr. Davis’s talk, Emoji: Past, Present, and Future, will discuss where emoji came from, why they have gotten so popular, where they’ve gone wrong, and what the future will bring.

“Emoji became very popular in Japan right after they were introduced in 1999,” said Dr. Davis. “Once they were added to Unicode in 2010, they became popular worldwide, used in modern mobile phones, texting systems, email, and so on. For example, there were some 6,000 articles on emoji in the month after Unicode 7.0 released, according to Google News.”

Dr. Davis will explore the history of emoji, how they came to be added to Unicode, how they are used in practice, and some of the deficiencies that people see. For example, what about the lack of human diversity and why isn’t there a hot dog emoji? He will then illuminate some of the future additions from Unicode and answer some of the most common questions about emoji.

IUC is the premier event covering the latest in industry standards and best practices for bringing software and Web applications to worldwide markets. Subject areas include the global impact, programming practices, fonts and rendering, and mobile computing. For the eighth year, Adobe will be sponsoring the conference.

To view the full IUC agenda and to register, visit www.unicodeconference.org.