Through each phase of the Arts & Humanities Research project Listening Across Disciplines II, listening protocols and vocabularies have been interlinked aspects of the research. They have now been brought together on a new interactive prototype: Platform for Listening Protocols and Vocabularies.

In the Listening Across Disciplines II research proposal, we described a plan to create a traditional glossary structure that would gradually be filled with entries from the partners involved in the fieldwork. This glossary was initially to be built into the LxD website, and as such would take advantage of the mechanics of the web: hyperlinks, popovers, etc.

In the background, additions to the glossary would generate a re-parsing of existing site content and new links would be created. Conversely, new content would be checked for existing keywords and any matches automatically linked to glossary entries. The glossary section was to use tiered metadata to differentiate between duplicate headwords, enabling multiple entries per headword while maintaining the knowledge domain associated with the definition.

Protocol Exploratory

The completion of the first round of listening protocols made it clear that we needed to think about the protocols’ content outside of the glossary structure; in some cases, multiple authors from the same domain used the same protocol but with slightly different vocabularies, or with different vocabulary definitions. On occasion the differences might just be different word usage but even in so few protocols, there were enough edge cases to demonstrate that a glossary structure would fail to be able to express these kinds of nuances. With a view to scaling up protocol entries over time, it was obvious we needed to create something else.

Nonetheless, we still needed to mine the protocols for metadata. Metadata structures were discussed and decided upon, and metadata was subsequently generated for each protocol. We performed some cursory data analysis25 across the collection to gain initial insights into what the protocols co-constituted, what interactions and cross-references existed, and what could be gleaned from viewing protocols from different data-visualization perspectives.

It became clear, due to the insufficient size of the corpus, that much of the metadata needed to be extracted by the research team, and in many cases, metadata was extrapolated from protocol content. These extrapolations, by not originating from the participants themselves, constituted a supervening context that, while scrupulously enacted, would necessarily add adventitious attributes to each protocol.

Protocols of Listening: Reflections on the Development of an Interactive Digital Platform for Cross-Disciplinary Sound Research

An invited contribution for Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, this paper presents six separate but connected understandings of a digital platform of listening vocabularies and protocols produced in the context of Listening Across Disciplines II, (LxDII) a cross- and transdisciplinary research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK (AHRC), conducted by the authors from 2018 to 2022. 

The paper is available to read (open access) at https://online.ucpress.edu/res/article/3/3/224/194087/Protocols-of-ListeningReflections-on-the