OCR-A is, in this sense, a rather “opaque” font, but its uses outside of actual optical character recognition eclipse the specific circumstances constraining each of its letters, working toward the obfuscation of Warde’s romanticized segregation of form and content.Ī second useful frame that this paper benefits from is that of media archaeology which is, as I understand it, a way of doing media theory with a historical perspective toward the technical and social conditions that make media culture possible in specific moments of history. The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words. As Beatrice Warde puts it in her exquisitely Modernist essay, “The Crystal Goblet or Printing should be Invisible”, After considering how these frames apply the aesthetic vestiges of machine reading, I’ll provide a brief history of OCR-A’s engineering and then conclude by exploring the significance of some examples of its use in popular culture.įirst, from the “invisible and unwanted” theme, invisibility is an ironically appropriate concept when discussing typography, since type operates within that particular sub-visibility of graphic design whereby it can be said to work best when it is noticed least. The occasion of this panel, a media archaeological approach to “the invisible and unwanted”, provides two convenient frames from which to explore this linkage. My paper today is about a typeface and font, OCR-A, and the link that exists between its contemporary uses in design back to the context from which it originated in the 1960s. Again, this is ongoing research and thinking, so I certainly appreciate comments, questions, suggestions. My slides are a PDF, which I’ll embed first below. My talk was about the font OCR-A, and it’s part of some research I’m doing as a bridge between my dissertation and a current fellowship project that should turn into a book.

Today, I presented a paper at the 2013 MLA Convention as part of a special session on Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old and New Media along with Lori Emerson, Paul Benzon and Mark Sample.

Ocr font like