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Thank you for the book recommendation; commenting so I have a quicker trail to it than trawling through the browser history...
One small yet substantive comment I have is that the "stacking" metaphor works better with fungible things. Consider "stack books", which works well both metaphorically and literally, versus "stack knowledge", which sounds a little grandiose and obviously has no connection to a literal stack of recorded wisdom.
It's much easier to coin words if you set aside semantic propriety and just shuffle around the syntactic elements. Any actual physicists would probably be horrified by this most improper of personifications; photons can't possibly be agents, performing some action! They don't even experience time, as once you actually quantize some photon away from the arbitrary noise of the electromagnetic field, the photon's entire trajectory is all one spacetime interval.
Semantic propriety can be fun, although it takes an effort: the photing is photed by the fabric of spacetime itself, and individual photons are illusory, a notational convenience for drawing signals out of the noise.
Statistically speaking, most photons that are just photing through space are getting redshifted; and I don't think that is quantized.... or if it is, then the resolution is much finer than anything familiar from atomic spectra.
I suspect that if you follow this distinction out all the way, you'll find that ideographic writing is also a collection of symbols that can be considered digits, although the base is much higher... while English might have an effective base around thirty (if you allow for some punctuation), Kanji has an accepted common base of a few thousand and if you held some professor's feet to the proverbial fire, you could probably establish some mathematical bound for this base.
Check out syllabaries. Some writing systems are really quite close to an extremely compressed trace of the analog signal, while still being a linear sequence of symbols.
neat, a Wikipedia diversion...
as for the aeronaut: Lee Scoresby is a character from His Dark Materials, a scifi trilogy that is not found in your bio's list of books! He's an excellent character, although if you'll need more motivation than only him if you want to read those books, because he doesn't appear at all in the first book.
I think the word that more accurately conveys what you probably mean when you write "digitizing", is "discretizing". The example of tonal languages is great, because musical signals are definitely decomposable (both by wetware brains and by electric circuitry) into discrete syntactic elements, regardless of any digitisation of the signal.
GENESIS