‘Reading with the fingers. Blindness, sensory substitution, and the possibilities for tactile communication’

After a call for papers for a special issue ‘Sensorium Commune’ of the journal Communications, edited by Marie-Luce Girard and Olivier Sorost, I didn’t realize what a fascinating journal it was. Not a straightforward ‘communications’ journal in the American sense, it was set up by Roland Barthes and others in France in the 1960s. Some issues, for example ‘Language and the Senses’ in 2010, have scholarship by both Anglo and French scholars, but the journal is French language only. My French is not up to that level, a shame.

So yesterday I submitted my article for this special issue ‘Sensorium Commune’. I take early experiments in tactile sign-systems and writing mechanisms as a way into thinking about sensory substitution, hence the title ‘Reading with the fingers. Blindness, sensory substitution, and the possibilities for tactile communication.’ I’ll add a link when the article is finally published.

I thoroughly encourage people to investigate the journal, which has a long and very broad interdisciplinary remit – inspect them here on the journal website. It is astonishing to see an article by Barthes, for example, in the first issue (1961).

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