The 16th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-2010) June 9-15, 2010, Washington, D.C, USA A SOCIAL PLATFORM FOR INFORMATION SONIFICATION: MANY-EARS.COM Anton Schertenleib Stephen Barrass University of Canberra, Information Sciences & Communication, ACT 2601, Australia anton.schertenleib@canberra.edu.au University of Canberra, Faculty Of Arts & Design, ACT 2601, Australia stephen.barrass@canberra.edu.au ABSTRACT In this paper we describe the Many Ears project that will develop the first example of a social site for a community of practice in data sonification. This site will be modeled on the Many Eyes site for “shared visualization and discovery” that combines facilities of a social site with online tools for graphing data. Anyone can upload a dataset, describe it and make it available for others to visualize or download. The ease of use of the tools and the social features on Many Eyes have attracted a broad general audience who have produced unexpected political, recreational, cultural and spiritual applications that differ markedly from conventional data analysis. The Many Ears project seeks to find out what will happen when data sonification is made more available as a mass medium? What new audiences will listen to sonifications? Who will create sonifications and for whom? What unexpected purposes will sonification be put to? 1. INTRODUCTION From the beginnings of email in the 1970’s, the internet has always been a social medium. The online newsgroups in the 1980’s allowed people from all over the world to chat about computers, science, recreational activities, social issues and an ever increasingly diverse array of alternative .alt directions. The invention of the HTML browser in the 1990’s allowed people to produce graphical pages with distinct URL addresses, and the world wide web bloomed with individually authored sites. Search engines made it possible to surf the web using keyword topics and phrases. In the 2000’s Web2.0 technologies such as the Wiki provided a framework for the distributed authorship of a site such as Wikipedia[1]. The hugely popular Facebook[2] site is composed of more than 350 million pages produced as a consequence of self representation and social interaction. Online Content Management Systems, such as Drupal[3], enabled communities to develop sites such as the ICAD[4] site in a bottom up manner. Content from different sites can be recombined in a Mashup constructed from material that has been aggregated and recomposed using RSS feeds. Sites such as Flickr[5] and Google Maps[6] provide Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) that allow other sites to access content from their online databases. Government departments, bureaus and agencies, museums, galleries and historical archives are similarly making data collections available online and accessible through API’s. Beyond access, online service providers provide data processing such as a text to speech synthesizer that can be embedded into another site. Many Eyes[7] is a site that combines social facilities with online services to enable “shared visualization and discovery”. The social facilities of the site include personal member pages, discussion topics, comments, ratings, watches and content sharing from the site. Participants can upload a dataset, describe it and make it available for others to visualize or download. The data can be visualized in 15 different ways that include line graphs, scatter plots, column/bar, pie, scatter and bubble charts. Data from different data sets can be mashed together to explore new questions. The extension of data visualization as a mass medium to a general audience has resulted in unexpected political, recreational, cultural and spiritual applications that differ markedly from the scientific analysis of data[8]. Music is a mass medium that has been an important cultural force throughout the 20th century in movements such as Folk, Rock and Tropicalismo. The social power of music combined with the social extension of Many Eyes raise the question of what would happen if data sonification was to become a mass medium too? What new audiences would sonification reach, and what new purposes would it be put to? This paper describes the Many Ears[9] project that seeks to answer these questions. This project is based on the development of the first social site for data sonification. The following sections begin with background on the motivation for data sonification. We then overview existing tools for data sonification and the techniques they provide. The next section then provides an overview of the facilities provided by online sites for social visualization. The main section then presents a specification and plan for the development of the Many Ears site that integrates the key aspects of social visualization sites with key sonification techniques. The final section briefly describes future work on data collection that will be used to answer questions about the audience and applications of the site. ICAD-295