Motivation

The purpose of sonification is, generally spoken, to investigate scientific data sets and to explore structures and patterns depicted in these data sets. However, the use of sonification up to now only happened in fields of natural science. We think that sonification offers a technique complementary to the usual data exploration techniques that can also be used within social scientific contexts. As a complement to established techniques, sonification has the potential to offer an approach to data exploration that in some contexts may be more promising to follow than others.

Though its field of application is not restricted to data sets with sequential information, we propose that this is one of the most promising areas. In fact, many research areas within the social sciences are concerned with events or actions in their temporal context: This branch of social research is even growing, presumably caused by the rising importance of questions of social change. Due to its inherent time factor, sonification can be an epistemically valuable technique for the exploration of sequence data sets.

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