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Brook Vann has long been interested in sound as a tool for both data analysis and digital storytelling.

“I have some really fond memories of having story time and having something read aloud,” Vann, a PhD candidate in media production, said. And they’re particularly interested in how the accessibility of sound can help a story better resonate with an audience.

Brook Vann curating an art show at D.D.D.D., in New York. Photo courtesy of Brook Vann.

“If your car is making a strange noise, you don’t have to be a trained musician to think about whether something is wrong with it,” they said. “And sound can help make sense of data that might otherwise be impalpable—it allows for a certain viscerality.”

Visceral is a good word for two research projects Vann has collaborated on—the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting and a eugenics campaign North Carolina embarked on a century ago. They said they are motivated to research heavy topics because they believe it’s important to be curious and talk about difficult things. Creative work, they said, brings stories to the public in a digestible way, and inspires a sense of curiosity in viewers—which is even more powerful when that audience is students.

“I get to teach undergraduates why media is important, and how and why you should engage with it,” Vann said. “I love talking to students about their intentions with the project versus how their peers interpreted it. And that’s where my creative practice comes in because I can share my own experiences working through a project and how I can be certain my audience receives the message I intend.”

It was this passion for teaching that led them to be one of six graduate students who represented the college at last year’s Institute on Teaching and Mentoring Conference, in Atlanta. Vann said it was a great opportunity to not only represent the college, but to also network with scholars from different fields, thus gaining new perspectives.

Their advisor,��Betsey Biggs, an assistant professor who’s working with them on the Pulse project, said Vann’s perspectives are a reason for their success.��

“They are willing to bring a lot of different fields together, such as sound studies, gender studies, music, art, cultural theory, materiality and so on,” Biggs said.

The Pulse team created a 24/7 web broadcast made up of eight individual audio channels. Alone, the channels are abstract, at times eerie and disjointed. For the full experience, users must listen with other participants, each using their own mobile device, in the same setting.

The inspiration for the project was a graffiti wall at the site of the shooting, where survivors and allies left messages in remembrance of the victims. The wall was recently torn down; in contrast, Vann and the team hope to further develop the memorial, expanding the eight channels to 49—one for each victim of the shooting—and integrating voices into the broadcast stream.��

“With the graffiti wall, you could see messages, but then they faded with time and new messages,” Vann said. “By allowing the community to contribute, it won’t have an end point—it will continue to be a space that holds memory and grief.

“Community engagement is something that’s always been important to me and has been a big part of the research and work I’ve done here at CMDI.”

And their research has taken them beyond Boulder. Last summer, Vann was a research fellow for the Digital Justice Lab, at Dartmouth College, where they worked closely with faculty and data scientists on a project called Eugenic States, which tracks forced sterilizations in North Carolina, Iowa and California. There were thousands of historical documents to sort through—many of which were heavily redacted—that had to be rendered into data points.

To make sense of the information, Vann created a booklet as well as an interactive digital platform that shows sterilizations filtered by age, assigned sex and county. Depending on the data’s value, the points vary in size and color, and there’s an ambient sound element Vann created to go with the data visualization.

“I was inspired by the blue ghost fireflies in North Carolina—when you're far away, they tend to have a green hue, but when you're closer, they look blue,” Vann said. “The counties with smaller numbers of sterilizations have a smaller ring with fewer green layers, while the counties with more sterilizations are blue, have more layers and take up more of the screen.”

Vann plans to continue working with the lab after graduating from CMDI in May, helping the Dartmouth team to integrate the interactive platform onto the servers there.

Biggs said their contributions to the college extend far beyond their creative successes.��

“They’ve really helped the culture of our department for the graduate students, and so we'll miss them, but we know they're gonna go out and do great things,” she said.