Benjamin Lindquist
Biographic Data
| ID | 387176 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin Lindquist |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin |
| FAMILY NAME | Lindquist |
| SIGNATURE | LINDQUIST B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Purdue University West Lafayette |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7052-5580 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 5 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 5 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Irrational Computer
How did the computer, a machine built for logic and calculation, come to model the messy human mind? To answer that, ‘The Irrational Computer’ breaks with a familiar narrative of rationalization and quantification that stretches from the Enlightenment to the Cold War. Against this story of rational mastery, this project shows how influential British and American engineers came in the middle of the last century to see controlled chaos as essential…
The Computer Will Take Your Call
This article reconstructs the overlooked history of early “talking terminals”—telephone-linked connections that, starting around 1960, generated simple responses to millions of callers. Drawing on corporate archives, technical reports, and popular media, it shows how postwar American banks, stock exchanges, and service firms adopted touch-tone phones and concatenated computer voices to automate clerical tasks once performed by women. These talkin…
The Art of Text-to-Speech
Long before Siri and ChatGPT uttered their first automated words, there was only one way to program synthetic speech: with paint and brush. During the transformative years between 1930 and 1960, artists, linguists, and engineers mixed sound and image in a way that combined artistic production with new technologies. What was known as “synthesis-by-art” grew into the rules that power computer speech today. This article concentrates on the emergence…
Slow Time and Sticky Media
Deaf artist Frank Beard, a leading political cartoonist of the Gilded Age, developed a visual idiom that combined partisanship and provocation with new print technologies to extend viewer engagement. As he repudiated partisan politics and embraced religion, he developed new sticky forms of media—chalk talks, fundamentalist cartoons, and hieroglyphic Bibles—meant to “catch the eye, fasten the attention, quicken the imagination and enthrall the sou…
Mutable materiality
Over the fifty years that Kenneth N. Taylor created children's Bibles, the pictures in these books changed dramatically, yet the text of the Bibles changed little. The relatively standardized text used in these books provides a neutral field where one can better observe the shifting presentation of the scriptural stories. In this essay I investigate how the changing materiality of Taylor's children's Bibles alters the story's meaning for the inte…
Mutable materiality
Over the fifty years that Kenneth N. Taylor created children's Bibles, the pictures in these books changed dramatically, yet the text of the Bibles changed little. The relatively standardized text used in these books provides a neutral field where one can better observe the shifting presentation of the scriptural stories. In this essay I investigate how the changing materiality of Taylor's children's Bibles alters the story's meaning for the inte…
The Art of Text-to-Speech
Long before Siri and ChatGPT uttered their first automated words, there was only one way to program synthetic speech: with paint and brush. During the transformative years between 1930 and 1960, artists, linguists, and engineers mixed sound and image in a way that combined artistic production with new technologies. What was known as “synthesis-by-art” grew into the rules that power computer speech today. This article concentrates on the emergence…
Mutable materiality
Over the fifty years that Kenneth N. Taylor created children's Bibles, the pictures in these books changed dramatically, yet the text of the Bibles changed little. The relatively standardized text used in these books provides a neutral field where one can better observe the shifting presentation of the scriptural stories. In this essay I investigate how the changing materiality of Taylor's children's Bibles alters the story's meaning for the inte…
Slow Time and Sticky Media
Deaf artist Frank Beard, a leading political cartoonist of the Gilded Age, developed a visual idiom that combined partisanship and provocation with new print technologies to extend viewer engagement. As he repudiated partisan politics and embraced religion, he developed new sticky forms of media—chalk talks, fundamentalist cartoons, and hieroglyphic Bibles—meant to “catch the eye, fasten the attention, quicken the imagination and enthrall the sou…
The Art of Text-to-Speech
Long before Siri and ChatGPT uttered their first automated words, there was only one way to program synthetic speech: with paint and brush. During the transformative years between 1930 and 1960, artists, linguists, and engineers mixed sound and image in a way that combined artistic production with new technologies. What was known as “synthesis-by-art” grew into the rules that power computer speech today. This article concentrates on the emergence…
The Irrational Computer
How did the computer, a machine built for logic and calculation, come to model the messy human mind? To answer that, ‘The Irrational Computer’ breaks with a familiar narrative of rationalization and quantification that stretches from the Enlightenment to the Cold War. Against this story of rational mastery, this project shows how influential British and American engineers came in the middle of the last century to see controlled chaos as essential…
The Computer Will Take Your Call
This article reconstructs the overlooked history of early “talking terminals”—telephone-linked connections that, starting around 1960, generated simple responses to millions of callers. Drawing on corporate archives, technical reports, and popular media, it shows how postwar American banks, stock exchanges, and service firms adopted touch-tone phones and concatenated computer voices to automate clerical tasks once performed by women. These talkin…
Art (3 works) · Cybernetics and Technology in Society (3 works) · Aesthetics (2 works) · History (2 works) · History of Computing Technologies (2 works) · Linguistics (2 works) · Philosophy (2 works) · Psychology (2 works) · Visual arts (2 works) · 1960s-1970s (1 work)