Jentery Sayers is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is the editor of Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (University of Minnesota Press) and The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities. His work has appeared in American Literature; Visible Language; The Journal of Electronic Publishing; Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures; Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; Computational Culture; Literature Compass; and Keywords for American Cultural Studies.
Authors | Jentery Sayers
Articles on Amodern by Jentery Sayers
OPTOPHONIC READING, PROTOTYPING OPTOPHONES
This article details the contributions of blind readers to the development, design, and marketing of the optophone, a text-to-tone transcription machine introduced in the early twentieth century. We combine archival research with prototyping to investigate the dimensions involved in past coding and decoding practices. If archives provide testimonial fragments about individual use, 2D to 3D translation helps scholars to more broadly characterize optophone reading and understand technical affordances.