PH Blog

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June 19, 2017

Sonic Word Clouds - a Digital History Project

Daniel Ruten

My name is Daniel Ruten, and I have just finished my undergraduate studies majoring in History at the University of Saskatchewan. During my last term, I took a course on Digital History (HIST396) with Dr. Jim Clifford. In it, I became familiarized with the various emerging digital tools and methodologies that are becoming increasingly important for historians to learn. The course also required that I create some kind of digital history project myself. For my project, I took inspiration from one lesson in particular featured on the Programming Historian website: historian Shawn Graham’s lesson on data sonification. Building off of what this lesson taught me, I developed my own method to represent and analyze textual data through sound, which I have termed Sonic Word Clouds. In this post I will briefly explain this method of sonification, while reflecting a bit on the learning process that both inspired the idea for this project and allowed me to make it a reality.