This interdisciplinary panel brings together scholars and professionals to present a range of papers around the theme of 19th-21st century Arabic-script typography. This under-studied area has received little attention at MESA and in the field of Middle East studies more broadly, and this panel is intended to spark interest and more sustained conversations around how a consideration of font, typography, and printing technologies might inform other scholars’ work.
The papers in this panel explore various aspects of the history, aesthetics, and technology of Arabic-script typography. The first paper explores the 19th-century efforts of Edward Salisbury to acquire and integrate sets of “Oriental” fonts into the Journal of the American Oriental Society, as a means of bolstering the society’s academic credentials to its presumed European readership, as well as tracing the history of the typesets after his death. The second paper examines typewriter manufacturers’ and amateur inventors’ efforts to develop workable Arabic-script typewriters in the late 1800s, and US consular and trade officials’ efforts to promote Arabic-script typewriters in the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th century. It suggests moving the historical focus away from the typewriter’s delayed adoption in the region, and toward the role that it played in an American imaginary of a “modern”, pro-commerce Middle East. The third paper examines the challenges of recent efforts to digitize early Arabic printed texts. It pays special attention to the challenges posed by Arabic typography for the optical character recognition (OCR) software used to accelerate the digitization process. The fourth paper analyzes the handling of Arabic script within Unicode – the unique code point assigned to every letter, character, or symbol of every common writing system, which provides a foundational standard for the global Internet. While Unicode has aided the mutual legibility of various scripts across software and coding platforms, it replicates the history of movable metal type and left-to-right script dominance in its structural logic, necessitating digital “solutions” that can help push Unicode toward new modes of digital typography.
Collectively, these papers address key concerns of Arabic-script typography through the “long 20th century.” By putting 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century concerns together in one panel, they highlight the common challenges that characterize the script, from the era of matrices & punches, to linotype, and on into the digital era. By foregrounding Arabic-script typography as an arena for scholarly research, they hope to highlight the rich possibilities for future research.
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Ms. Roberta L. Dougherty
In 1841, Yale College appointed Edward Elbridge Salisbury (1814-1901) the first Professor of Arabic & Sanskrit Languages & Literature in the Americas. He was also among the earliest elected to membership in the American Oriental Society (founded 1842)—one of the oldest scholarly societies in the United States, and the oldest devoted to a particular field of study—and served the society in several capacities during its first half-century of existence. Among these was his role on the society’s Publications Committee, during which he energetically sought to obtain suitable fonts to print “Oriental” languages (in particular, Arabic, Syriac, Sanskrit, and Armenian) in their respective scripts in the society’s journal. He was driven by the notion that supporting these scripts was key to the journal’s—and ultimately the AOS’—favorable reception by a more established European academic readership. He was assisted in his quest by his contacts with European publishers, American missionaries such as Eli Smith and the typefounder Homan Hallock (who together created the “American Arabic” typeface used in the Bible translation of 1864), and his own students sent abroad to study, making it possible for him to source the best and most beautiful fonts then available from European typefounders. As a person of wealth, and as a member of a fledgling American scholarly community seeking to assert itself among European savants, Salisbury provided these fonts to the AOS at his own expense, with no expectation of compensation. In his will, he left his cases of Oriental type (then located in the basement of what is now called Dwight Chapel, the “Old Library,” of Yale) for the use of the AOS in perpetuity. These many cases of exotic font have now all completely vanished, as Linotype made it possible to publish even scripts like Syriac in the early 1900s. This paper is supported by evidence found in Salisbury’s own letters & journals as found in the Yale Manuscripts & Archives Department, the New Haven Historical Society, & the archives of the AOS.
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This paper charts the appearance of the typewriter in late 19th century Middle East, focusing on the Arabic-speaking world, and asking what we can learn from this history. An American invention in its dominant form (the Remington), the typewriter was by the turn of the century being promoted to various language communities around the world – even those for which its technical limitations also limited its utility. For Arabic, the early typewriter’s lack of an upper and lower case register meant similar challenges with respect to mechanically reproducing a letter’s initial, medial, and final forms. Nor was it able to reproduce diacritical marks, including voweling. Once the shift key was introduced, it was possible to introduce an initial, connected letter along with the freestanding form. Aesthetically and technically, however, questions remained – particularly with respect to the perceived attractiveness of the font, and the smoothness of the letter joinings.
Yet typewriter usage did not become standard business or governmental practice until well after World War I, as assorted scholars have noted. This paper proposes shifting the historical focus away from the question of its “successful” diffusion, and towards two other questions. It uses a blend of United States consular and trade reports, supplemented by period newspaper articles, memoirs, and corporate documents, and draws upon scholarship on the history of typewriting in other parts of the world, as well as histories of technology adoption and innovation in the Middle East. It investigates the ways in which the Arabic-speaking Middle East was conceived as a ripe and politically salient market for typewriting, particularly in the 1890s and 1900s. While typewriter manufacturers saw a growing market, US officials saw the typewriter as a symbol of a forward-looking, modernizing, commercially oriented region – starting with Egypt. How did the typewriter figure into this powerful Middle East imaginary, and how did its slow adoption in the region impact US officials’ view of the region? Looking ahead to the later 20th century, what might the history of the typewriter teach us about the introduction of Arabic-language word processing, considered a similarly vexed technological development?
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This paper analyzes the handling of Arabic script within the Unicode Standard. First proposed in 1991, Unicode is a foundational standard of the global Internet. It assigns a unique code point to every letter, character, or symbol of every commonly shared writing or notational system. Prior to the spread of Unicode, a diversity of encoding schemes proliferated. This resulted in typographic and textual confusion, when, for example, an email encoded in Arabic script—or another non-Latin script—appeared as nonsensical gobbledygook when opened on a computer that utilized a different encoding scheme. By standardizing all the world’s scripts within a consistent encoding scheme, Unicode greatly facilitated the exchange of multilingual texts and multi-script typography.
Nevertheless, Unicode remediates the history of typography. The legacies of moveable metal type, digitized Latin script, and the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) continue to shape international computing. The Unicode Standard assumes that linguistic and written characters possess certain properties, many of which are challenged by the structure of Arabic script. Unlike Latin type, Arabic script has a large number of contextual character shapes, it is necessarily cursive, it layers a wide range of optional diacritics above and below the line of primary text, and it flows from right to left. Incorporating these features into the Unicode standard challenged the digital dominance Latinate typography.
Drawing upon Arabic script examples, this paper discusses how formal typographic structures are encoded digitally in Unicode. It analyzes the organization of the basic Arabic Unicode block (defined as U+0600 through U+06FF), the Arabic supplemental and extended blocks, and the blocks of Arabic presentation forms. It also highlights Arabic structures and historical usages that are excluded from, or difficult to represent, in Unicode. Analyzing Unicode from the perspective of non-Latin writing systems raises pertinent questions about cultural participation and technical representation in a globalized world. Digital solutions to the “challenges” of Arabic script are increasing applied beyond the script itself; they expand the typographic possibilities of other scripts, including Latin. Unicode’s handling of Arabic script asks us to reassess historical legacies while suggesting new modes of digital typographic practice.
