Case Studies: Character-Level Works
摘要
This chapter will analyze nine works of sinograph-based digital language art, including two translated works. All of these are character-level works, while subcharacter-level works will be addressed in the next chapter. Character-level works are composed of complete and intact sinographs that people typically encounter in daily life and literature. Digital transformation of characters may occur in these works, but only as a transition between intact sinographs. These are also the basic units in most commercial digital language processing applications. As a semantic unit, an individual sinograph's linguistic function varies in different contexts. Using linguistic concepts such as morpheme, phoneme, grapheme, and word, this chapter will demonstrate how digital apparatuses further enable such instability through interactivity, generation, and transformation. By the end of this chapter, four specificities and ten affordances will be identified, showing how artists apply individual sinographs to create works of digital language art. Additionally, it will explore how these affordances can be used to address social topics, such as the issue of traditional versus simplified Chinese and the relationships between different Chinese languages and dialects.