Frank Mondelli (Author)
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 39
Pages: 150-166
In the fifteen years after World War II, some Japanese schoolteachers and technologists sought to create a new kind of assistive technology for deafness and hearing impairment: tactile and visual devices that were intended not to amplify sound but rather to transmute it to sight and touch. Though almost never available commercially, these devices frequently appeared in media coverage and, on at least one occasion, in the halls of the Japanese Diet. Consequently, I argue that these devices, which I call minor assistive technologies, exerted influence on ideas and practices surrounding deafness, music, and Japanese communications technologies writ large. I draw on contemporary newspaper accounts, academic journals, and personal letters to detail key moments in this history, such as Norbert Wiener’s 1956 tour of Japan, and consider these technologies in light of similar, contemporary vibrotactile devices in the twenty-first century, some of which use rhetoric similar to that of their historical predecessors.
...MoreArticle Mara Mills; Jaipreet Virdi; Sarah F. Rose (2024) Disability, Epistemology, Sciencing. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-24).
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