Bloomsbury Academic Sounding the Digital Humanities: Distant Sonification in Theory and Practice

Sounding the Digital Humanities provides a theory and application of a sonic practice - distant sonification - to argue for sound’s place in humanist data analysis, contextualized in a history of sonic methods and digital humanities. Computation enables new ways of engaging with cultural criticism in cognate disciplines like the humanities and social sciences. Current approaches such as distant reading, networks, and topic modelling support new forms of reading but typically rely on visual or textual representation. Previous digital humanities work has tended not to address the methodological potential of sonic practice for computational analysis; this text presents the method “distant sonification” to both engage with and extend digital humanities techniques. This book provides both theory and practice of this sonic method, including the steps taken for each method. Sonic methods are first explored and understood through an approach that considers technology’s role and sound’s relationship to becoming a knowledge-generating, or epistemic, object. The method is framed as a digital humanities method, and as such presents a theory of sonification through which sound is a digital object. Supporting the theory are two case studies, which community and noise, respectively, in which computational aspects of sound are used as both critical method and auditory representation.