Data translation processes like visualization and sonification can be used to “tell stories with data” (Lenzi & Gleria 2018, p. 89), providing researchers with innovative approaches to analyze research data and communicate findings to broad audiences (Sawe et al 2020). Sonification has recently gained popularity as an alternative to the more established process of data visualization because of how it can enable an immersive experience of multidimensional and large datasets (Cooke et al 2017). As an emerging method for analyzing and communicating data, sonification presents new and exciting opportunities for researchers to engage critically and creatively with data. However, like data visualization, sonification can also obscure the politics and normative cultural assumptions about the relationship between quantitative data and objectivity if it is wielded as a neutral approach to translating data into information.

Our contribution harnesses these tensions by putting forward preliminary considerations for sonification as a critical experimental method for communication and media studies. We examine how sonification as a method can create an analytic space to draw out the unspoken relations that structure the imagined objectivity of data-driven approaches to research (Campt 2015; Benjamin 2019).

Sound is widely recognized as an efficient yet complex means of communicating meaning and emotion through time, space, and frequencies, giving listeners a distinct and subjective perspective of data that may otherwise be inaccessible. Some musicologists who work with data sonification fixate on the idea of accurate representation (i.e. mapping sounds that represent the data as closely as possible). For example, the sound of a ticking clock might represent the passage of time through a particular data set. But these kinds of sounds are often culturally determined. Instead, our presentation examines how sonification can tune us into silences, omissions and intensities when employed as a counterintuition.

In our exploration of data sonification as a method, we integrate examples of how we have applied it as a method in research, teaching and learning. Sonification, as we argue, is an exploratory and explanatory method to activate different “modalities of perception, encounter and engagement” (Campt 2015 p.4). We turn to queer and post-colonial sound studies to look at how sonification can encourage alternative engagements with data, particularly marginalized data that may not be recognized through existing frameworks. It allows for a way to engage with disobedient data that is messy, marginal, and otherwise incomprehensible under dominant modes of data translation.

Digital storytelling provides new opportunities for DH as both academic fields seek to encourage dialogue, make the world comprehensible, and discover new ways of interaction with the support of digital tools (Barber, 2016). It gives us the opportunity to hear the voices missing from the historical record. How might we reimagine the democratization of and challenges to the human record?

Digital storytelling is regarded by many media researchers as an important way of embodying folk creativity with the assistance of new media forms (Burgess, 2006). From the perspective of media research, the act of storytelling itself can be closely related to the expression of social rights and unequal power distribution; the act of storytelling in traditional media channels often lacks the ability to fully represent society, thus the emergence of digital storytelling is argued by some be a part of social justice movements that challenge the power of the mainstream discourse (Canella, 2017). For GLAM practitioners, working with local communities, digital storytelling is one of their essential tools for collecting important pieces of evidence and material for preserving the memory of the community. These contain more diverse and efficient memory materials than the traditional single-form historical records used in the past, such as scattered textual archival records, undigitized old photos, un-transcribed oral history materials (audio and video recordings) and so on. We argue that it is essential to include the voices of the marginalized to democratize the historic record.

The Shanghai Memory Project gathers and aggregates data from its rich holdings, and we use a critical research method to examine and reflect on the use of digital storytelling as part of the project. These data include the voices of the ordinary people of Shanghai, and particularly the traditional vernacular (Shanghainese) dialect, which can help to redress the biases and the historical record. We acknowledge and reflect on the biases within our records that have impacted on the selection process along with ideological and other consequences to rectify the historical record (Guilliano, 2022). This is an important additional dimension to the wider Shanghai Memory project. These data fill the gaps in the historical and cultural record so that we can ‘ensure that the stories and voices which have been underrepresented in both print and digital knowledge production […] can be heard’ (Risam, 2018. p.129).

There is a great potential for DH practitioners to make use of GLAM collections to discover new material and support knowledge creation through the lens of digital storytelling. More importantly, it moves the focus from the mainstream and gathers individual and collective memories from the marginalized, the minority, the overlooked, and forgotten, what Castells (2011) calls ‘counter power’ to challenge the established historiography. Digital storytelling can be a powerful tool to influence the ‘ways in which narratives are crafted and […] the struggle over how dominant paradigms are established, reinforced and [also importantly, how they are] resisted’ (Canella, 2017. p.26). These diverse viewpoints are needed to achieve balance in the historical and cultural record.

This presentation discusses how digital humanities scholars working with archives necessarily must re-imagine their approach to communication of research findings in order to create more equitable access for community members and stakeholders. We will consider SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta as an example of a public-facing and community-engaged approach to de-archiving, and then showcasing the results of how we ultimately share and are reframing/recontextualizing archives of literary audio (recorded from the 1960s-1980s) for the public. “De-archiving,” to borrow a term from David Berry, rethinks archival practice as a process of activation rather than preservation, with the goal being to open up these collections to the public and to artists, who are in turn engaged in the process of reflecting on and responding to these works and in this way invigorating them with new meaning.

SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta houses a collection of rare literary audio recordings, and in fact our local research group began with the discovery of a cardboard box of these reel-to-reel tapes. The recordings—which include poet and sound artist performances, classroom lectures, and campus radio shows, dating back to the 1960s—are an example of the audiotext or sounded text as an emergent object of literary study (Kahn; Perloff and Dworkin; Camlot). These audiotextual works have inspired new forays into public-facing scholarship, from podcast episodes to participant-driven listening practice sessions, which seek to engage the local artistic community and wider public with these archives and, in doing so, reinvigorate them with meaning.

Our paper builds on recent theorizations of what O’Driscoll and Fong term “ethical listening,” engaging with critical questions such as: How do we be good caretakers of audio data, aural/audio histories? Who are the stakeholders represented in the collection and also what is at stake, not just in terms of our legal obligations, but our ethical and moral responsibilities? In our paper, we will discuss how creating a digital audio collection can create opportunities to open up a dialogue between scholars and artists, as well as addressing the practical implications of contacting rights holders and the process of making archival audio available and accessible to the broader research community.