Throughout this semester, students in my Introduction to Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities course were encouraged to experiment and play with new tools. (Some even found their way to previous projects, which continue to be under revision!)
As someone who rarely gets the chance to utilize maps, and after focusing a bit too heavily on KnightLab tools used to add to a previous podcast project, I decided to transition my focus to Sound Mapping tools!
A look at some of my favorite recently created maps! Starting with…
The Sounds of David C. Driskell Community Park
Rainy weather on May 6, 2024, didn’t stop anyone from enjoying time outside at the local community park. This map of clips recorded while walking along the jogging paths at Driskell Park featured everything from quiet ambient bird chirps to overhead helicopters and motorcycles. It also broke a lot. Challenges of basic HTML coding aside, this truly did provide a lot of room for curating audio, trial and error with coding, and engagement with OpenStreets — a common and worthwhile final addition. Hopefully, a future project can more adeptly manage iframe errors and ensure that the audio is more accessible to users.
Tracing My YouTube Subscriptions
A genuine question I had (that Google most definitely has an answer for) is where my most watched and subscribed-to YouTube channels originate. I wanted to spend a while tracing some of these subscriptions to specific locations and consider if I was experiencing one worldview or regional perspective more than all others.
Google definitely doesn’t make it easy to obtain this data anymore, despite its likely usefulness to advertisers and digital marketers. Collecting information required a bit of hand scribbling and sorting.
What We Know Now 