Final Assignment

Final Assignment

In preparation for the final assignment, we have been using the application Survey123 in order to build a collective data set concerning the sounds we encounter on campus. In that exercise we used a form builder application to construct certain metadata fields we could collect along with observations about sound. This exercise was designed less as an objective way of "soundmapping" the campus, than as an opportunity to "listen with" it. On the other hand, working with data--as we have learned this semester--provides us with many other opportunities for understanding and interpretation, which can go far beyond than the main intention of the data collection project.

The final assignment should be of approximately the same length as Assignments 1 and 2. You should tie it to the data collection process, but in it, you can address *any* question, theoretical or practical, which arose in class or in the field, from the readings on Dear Data to Challenging Datafication, passing through our experience of 32 Sounds.

The length of this assignment should be as Assignment 1 and 2, approximately 1500 words. You should have collected 20 points of data over a three week period and those points should be findable in the Survey123 interface. You should include images, screenshots, drawings, map embeds, or any other visual which help you make your point.

You should speak some about the experience of capturing sounds, listening "with" campus, perhaps patterns you found, but feel free to be creative to move on to other questions which the exercise has brought about.

You are encouraged to link what you have learned in this process to the readings, podcasts, lectures from the course of the semester.

Please make this assignment a sub-page of your other assignments and clearly visible from the landing page of your site. Please avoid displaying the data in a way which makes the net ID of the data collectors visible.

Some possible guiding questions (but you are by no means limited to these):

• What can sousveillance on our campus teach you?

• How easy or complex was the data collection process? From analyzing the various fields, time and date stamps, do you think we have a good sample of observations about campus? a "good enough" sample? If you think that we need more data, how would we go about that process?

• What kinds of sounds were noticed by the data collectors on campus? How much variety is there? What are the outliers?

• For given zones of campus are there patterns of sounds? or of observations of sounds? are these expected? clichéd? unexpected?

• Did we accomplish the act of "listening with" our campus? can you say that you have a new kind of awareness of, or connectedness with, the space in which we live? are we able to show empathy for others using data? or does the mapping process simply reinforce our resignation or surveillance realism? or does it reinforce the "atomisation" of individual action (Hintz et al)?

• What did you learn about campus which has nothing to do with sound? in other words, what are some data "by products" of this exercise?

• What can this tell you about the places on campus you frequent? Is there a risk of "de-anonymization" of the data?

• The work of the campus architect Rafael Viñoly has been described as "driven by the belief that the responsibility of architecture is to elevate the public realm." Can you relate what you learned about listening with campus in this exercise to this claim?

• Hintz et al argue that geomaps can "facilitate the further development of digital activism, and put our focus on the datafication of social practices." Is this relevant at all to our project?

• Could this project have been carried out by non-human actors? What do you suspect the difference in results to have been?

• What do you think that machine learning might make of the data you collected?

• To ask Lamden's question, what does this soundmapping exercise "have to do with privacy?"

• What have we not been able to capture about campus sound? What does the data not contain?

• How does the creation of a Survey123 data collection exercise sit between raw data and information (Lamdan)?

• What might you do with the data from this exercise to make campus a better place? or to tell an interesting story about campus to someone who has never been there?

• If you were to redesign this exercise what would you add? subtract?