About

ClockWork
is a digital humanities sonification project developed by the 2015-2016 cohort of the Praxis Fellowship at the Scholars’ Lab of the University of Virginia.

We were charged by the Scholars’ Lab with imagining time outside of the commonly-used framework of a timeline. We theorized the relationships between time, commodities, the purchasing power of wages, and the value systems that these relationships structure from our cross-disciplinary perspectives.

You are now in the virtual space that emerged from this challenge. This site has two primary modes:

First, it is the thing itself, which is to say that is a virtual space that offers several specific interpretations of time— sonifications. In short, we developed a multidimensional method for representing the purchasing power of wages against commodities over time in sound using the programming language SuperCollider.

Second, it is an interpretation of itself, which is to say that the entire website is a virtual interpretation of the way it came to be and the contributions it might make. As you move through the site, we explain how and why we made it the way we did, we critique our thought processes and our methods, and we guide you to resources to keep pursuing the ideas that emerge while you are here.

The site is also a platform for a teaching our method to undergraduate humanists which includes technology tutorials and extensive documentation of the humanist and technologist inquiries that led us to our method. In short, we developed a multidimensional method for representing the purchasing power of wages against commodities over time in sound using the programming language SuperCollider, as well as a platform for a teaching our method to undergraduate humanists which includes technology tutorials and extensive documentation of the humanist and technologist inquiries that led us to our method.