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Unicode was a name coined by Joseph Becker in 1988, a researcher in the Xerox lab in Palo Alto, California.³² In 1984, he had written a seminal article for Scientific American on multilingual word processing,³³ and in 1987–88 was working with a colleague at Xerox, Lee Collins, and Mark Davis at Apple. A Unicode Working Group formed in 1989, Microsoft, Sun, IBM, and other companies soon joining, creating today’s Unicode Consortium in 1991. At its first release in October 1991, Unicode consisted of 7,161 characters. The June 2017 release added 8,518 new characters, bringing the total to 136,755.³⁴

In a manner that has become typical of the global governance of digital meanings, companies have eschewed competition to form non-profits that they control so singular and universal agreement can be reached about the means of production, distribution, and exchange of meanings. Representatives from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Adobe are now on the Unicode Consortium’s board of directors.³⁵

The details of the Unicode standards have been thrashed out in volunteer subcommittees and conferences since 1991, but the basis of their work is to catalogue thousands of years of human writing practices, as well as new practices such as the use of emojis.^§AS1.1.1a The participants argue the merits of new candidates for the compendium in obsessively careful detail. The end result is that, for all our apparent uncertainties about meaning in the modern world, there is just one definitive list of the elementary components of all writing, ever – and this is it.

Today, everybody uses Unicode on their phones, web browsers, and word processors. Only the aficionados argue, but even then, the arguments are limited to details and are readily resolvable by consensus. Such are the manners that the players are sometimes able to keep in the backrooms of digital governance.

Most Unicode characters are ideographs; just a few are phonemes, even if the relatively few phonemes in the character set still get a lot of use. By the time we reach dentistry symbols and emojis in Unicode, we encounter ways of meaning that are getting close to image. There has been a tendency in the digital age to move our character set towards ideographs – not only numbers, but symbols and emojis of internationalization in our contemporary multilingual spaces, the navigational icons in user interfaces, and visual design that marks the larger textual architectures of the page and the screen. “We are all becoming Chinese,”³⁶ says Jack Goody,^§AS1.4.7a anthropologist of writing, flowers, and love, if only half in jest.

One of the underlying reasons for this convergence with image is that the digitized images of characters are manufactured in the same way as all other images, by the composition of pixels. These are invisible to the casual viewer, only to become visible as conceptual wholes – as a character in writing or a picture. The fact that writing and images are today made of the same stuff brings them closer together for the most pragmatic of reasons in the media of their manufacture and distribution. They can easily sit beside each other on the same screen or digitally printed surface, or they can layer over each other.

These are some of the mundanely practical reasons why, in the era of digital meaning, we put text beside image in our listing of meaning forms, and not speech as might be conventionally expected. And there are other reasons, the most profound of which is that we see writing but hear speech. Writing is close to image, whereas speech is close to sound. This has always been the case. But today the conjunctions are closer than ever, providing a practical rationale for why today we need to disaggregate “language” in a grammar of multimodality.

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³¹https://unicode.org

³² Joseph D. Becker, 1988, “Unicode 88,” Palo Alto, CA: Xerox Corporation.

³³ Joseph D. Becker, 1984, “Multilingual Word Processing,” Scientific American251(1):96–107.

³⁴ https://www.unicode.org/history/summary.html

³⁵ https://www.unicode.org/consortium/directors.html

³⁶ In conversation, at our Third International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, Cambridge University, August 2–5, 2005.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 23-25. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Unicode §0.2.1a