Two of Cathy Davidson’s recent blog entries at Hastac feature videos on  Tinkering and Sound. They’re both fascinating links, but especially the 2002 interview with Emily Thompson about Sound. Thompson (who won the MacArthur is brilliant) and her work was part of the inspiration for the Teaching American History project I developed, the Sounds of American History. Thompson explores how the transformations in what people heard and how they listened. She argues that people heard a new kind of sound, produced by modernity and that they listened differently, too, as consumers of a commodity. Machines did not just change society; they changed how we sensed and perceived life itself.