The Sinograph in Digital Language Art

This book presents a study of digital works—primarily built using Chinese characters or Japanese kanji—to identify the affordances of sinographs. This book considers the digital specificities of the sinograph and unpacks how they influence both artists and readers in creating and receiving works. It also explores how artists utilize the unique affordances of this non-alphabetical writing system in their creations and seeks to answer questions that contribute to the growing body of work on sinographs in digital language art to facilitate further understanding and application. Based on the premise that sinographs provide affordances for creating digital works that differ from other writing systems, this book investigates how these unique affordances contribute to the meaning-making process of sinographic digital language art. This, in turn, helps expand the scope of interpretation by taking into account both formal factors and cultural contents. By showing how developments in technology have generated opportunities for manipulating language in the digital environment, the author expands upon the possibilities afforded by these technologies and their application in commercial products, as well as their mode of exploration by artists, writers, and coders. While theories have emerged for analyzing digital literature, most are not specific to any written language, and were originally developed for works that use letter-based scripts, such as English. This book confronts this deficit within the body of work on digital literary analysis. It is a relevant text for scholars and students working in the digital humanities and all areas of digital media and culture.