Guest Post: Sonification and Data Rescue 🛟

At the recent IASSIST conference, we learned of an effort to sonify the work connected to our Data Rescue Project Tracker. Sonification is a fascinating area used in a variety of fields. This project conveys well the urgency we all felt during the early months of 2025, so we invited Will to share his work with our volunteers. Thanks so much to Will Clary for this fun project!

I recently had the pleasure of attending IASSIST25 in Bristol, UK, and was lucky enough to present on a topic near and dear to my heart: data sonification. Though there is disagreement on the best way to define the act and output most appropriately, the most basic explanation is that sonification is the use of non-speech audio to convey information or perceptualize data. Further disagreements arise when discussing its utility as an alternative form of perceptualization, however recently it has found a place in discourse as an effective tool in the realm of data journalism.

🛟 The Data Rescue Project 🛟

Using information from the original Data Rescue Tracker (check out the new portal if you haven’t already!) and the program Sonic Pi, I started to compose/code a sonification that would take a simple spreadsheet and transform it into an audio narrative. The piece spans January to May of 2025. I juxtaposed the current administration’s efforts to defund and delete with DRP’s efforts to save and safeguard. I chose to express not just the rate of rescue, but also the size of the datasets rescued. In the finished product you are presented with a story about, and composed of, DRP’s work. Each beep is a dataset rescued, and pitch is tied to the size of the dataset. Threats to publicly available data are announced via klaxon, and with the arrival of each threat you can audibly recognize DRP’s response as the rescue rate increases. You can listen to the sonification on YouTube.

My work on this sonification inevitably led to introspection about how we use data. What is compelling about beeps and boops? Just as data points gain meaning through relationships, this sonification gains significance through its connection to the effort it represents. By transforming the DRP’s metadata into sound, we can hear every rescued dataset becoming a note in an overture of potential discoveries, waiting to form the harmonies of future research. There is something recursive about using rescue data to tell a story about data rescue itself, with preservation becoming both subject and method. This sonification serves as both artifact and advocacy, created with the hope that data preservation is not simply safe storage but the maintenance of that space where future meaning resonates.