Sounding Data Justice for Environmental Liberation in Southeast Queens

In a new video interview, 2024 ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grantees Emily Verla Bovino, Assistant Professor of Performing and Fine Arts at York College CUNY, and Barbara Brown, Chairperson of the Eastern Queens Alliance, share their work on Sounding Data Justice for Environmental Liberation in Southeast Queens.

Sounding Data Justice is a transdisciplinary project focused on data literacy, data ethics and environmental awareness, with partners from Eastern Queens Alliance, Inc. and York College – The City University of New York. The project transforms data into sound to develop new ways of sharing air quality and aircraft noise data that EQA gathers, controls, manages and interprets.

The ACLS Digital Justice Grant Program, supported by the Mellon Foundation, awards digital humanities projects at various stages of development that diversify the digital domain, advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice, and/or contribute to public understanding of racial and social justice issues. 

Watch the interview and read the transcript below.

Barbara Brown (BB): We’re very close to JFK airport, and we are concerned about the amount of airplane noise that people are exposed to.

Emily Verla Bovino (EVB): Oh, this sounds like a dying bird.” And we had this whole conversation of, ‘That could be interesting,’ because we might not be thinking about dying birds if we’re just looking at visualized data. They may not notice it like that, because it’s the damage over time of the consistent loud noise that doesn’t really register for us, that it’s it’s so loud that it’s, you know, bursting our eardrums.

BB: Having community sonified data gives people in the community another way of understanding. It gives people another dimension to to actually understand the data. Before this project, the data was in graph form. For a lot of people, that probably doesn’t mean a lot.

EVB: If I’m listening to it and the sound goes up, and it reaches such a high pitch that it’s uncomfortable, I now feel the discomfort in a different way, than what a person is necessarily feeling on the ground.

BB: Digital justice is taking the data and making it accurate and real for the people and for the community. So instead of just looking at some graphs, they could hear the points on the graph in sound. It made the data come alive.

EVB: We were able to purchase a special type of laptop that we can actually fold over the screen to the back of the keyboard so that, as we are inside of Eastern Queens Alliance and we’re working on data and transforming the data into sound, we can then actually carry, flip over that laptop, it turns into a tablet. We can come outside, and it becomes a device that we can use together with the sensor kits that the ACLS Digital Justice Grant also allowed us to be able to purchase.