#lcc10 Jack Kausch - A prototype for De Arte Combinatoria

details & slides: https://conlang.org/lcc10/#kausch
speaker: Twitter @Kausch, https://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/profiles/john_kausch.html

The young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s 1660 pamphlet, De Arte Combinatoria, caused a fervor throughout Europe. It also began a theme for what would become his career – the creation of an ideal language, the Characteristica Universalis.

This paper is a work of research creation, which demonstrates a modern user interface constructed according to the specifications in Leibniz’s pamphlet.

Leibniz’s Characteristica Universalis is interpreted as a phonosemantic or ideographic writing system to be used as arguments in a logical calculus. He describes a set of Llullian mnemonic wheels, which are implemented as rotating pie charts (completing the circle of some of Playfair’s original inspiration for the pie chart, Ramon Llull) (Spence, 2005).

The hieroglyphic characters Leibniz describes are implemented as Unicode hieroglyphs which are hyperlinks to DBpedia entries. The relation of Leibniz’s representation system to relational and graph database models are also discussed, as well as the potential to use multidimensional data visualization to achieve the aims of Leibniz’s ideal language.

References

De Arte Combinatoria https://www.math.ucla.edu/~pak/hidden/papers/Quotes/Leibniz-Arte-Combinatoria.pdf
Llullian mnemonic wheels https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo91674300.html
Spence, Ian. "No humble pie: The origins and usage of a statistical chart." Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics 30.4 (2005): 353-368.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3701294
Design portfolio: https://observablehq.com/@universalcharacter/universal-character-language-prototype?collection=@universalcharacter/portfolio
Prototype of user interface: https://observablehq.com/@universalcharacter/universal-character-language-prototype
Visualization of data: https://projector.tensorflow.org/?config=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JackKausch/ImageSnippets/main/projector_config.json

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