Haptic media studies

We are grateful for the opportunity to share with you eight exceptional pieces that, we hope, help lay the groundwork for Haptic Media Studies (HMS). As co-editors, each of us has made touch the centerpiece of our research programs, exploring its manifestation in media, technology, philosophy, culture, and history. Paterson’s The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects, and Technologies (Berg, 2007) remains an influential work that serves as a cornerstone for touch-related studies across a wide range of fields, and other publications explore haptics in terms of technology, media, and methodologies (e.g. Paterson 2006, 2009). His more recent Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision, and Touch after Descartes (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), by exploring the conceptual and technological histories of sensory substitution, traces the complex entanglement of vision and touch in communicative practice. Parisi’s publications on tactility, including his forthcoming Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and his work on the tactile aspects of videogame interfaces (e.g. Parisi, 2008, 2014), situate contemporary haptic human–computer interfaces in a macrohistorical framework, linking them back to prior technological constructions of touch in medical electricity, psychophysics, and cybernetics. Archer’s work investigates cultural processes of tactile education around digital media, where users are asked to acclimate themselves to new habits of touching and navigating digital interfaces.