Introduction

Abstract Before the Unicode Standard, text shared across digital devices was often garbled, a problem that disproportionately affected users of non-Latin scripts. Unicode's emergence in the 1990s resolved this by encoding the world's major scripts into a single global standard that made text interoperable across digital devices—a development especially consequential in Asia, home to more than ninety percent of non-Latin script users. Yet Unicode is not a neutral infrastructure. Each encoding decision—which characters to include, how to handle script boundaries, whether to unify Sinographs across linguistic traditions—was shaped by the competing interests of large technology companies, national governments, user communities, and scholars. And each carried enduring political implications. This introduction argues that it is time for humanities scholars to critically engage with the ways in which Unicode crystallized at the intersection of state power, capital, and culture to become the foundation of a global infrastructure that governs nearly all textual communication today. It situates the four articles in this volume within the existing scholarly literature, provides a glossary of key technical terms, and introduces the closing roundtable in which technical experts and humanities scholars reflect on the field's future directions.