Interdisciplinarity is a key concept driving many calls for collaborative research and innovative teaching in the humanities. The benefits of interdisciplinarity in education (and research) include “an integration of knowledge, freedom of inquiry, and innovation”  [Boix Mansilla and Dawes Duraisingh 2007, 217] which is considered crucial to solving contemporary social problems and enhancing understanding of the arts and literature. That said, it is often difficult to embark on given that “disciplinary silos and discourse communities… stand as barriers to interdisciplinary research and education” which in turn keep researchers from benefitting from each other's knowledge [Borrego and Newswander 2010, 62]. This article recounts the story of an interdisciplinary research project (which united the fields of web development and cultural anthropology) that highlights failure as an important part of the research process. As an example, we reflected on the frequent crashing of the website by the anthropologists as they tried to input new material in a custom content management system. The anthropologists often entered data in ways that yielded the message “502 Bad Gateway”, an error which appears whenever two servers running simultaneously aren’t communicating. In the early days of the project, we came to see this phrase as a metaphor for the process of working collaboratively, with our web project traversing many gateways, between multiple viewpoints, priorities and interests, holding fast in some instances, and breaking down in others.[1] Despite its negative connotations, we employ this phrase constructively to explain the negotiated, stop and start process that characterised the working relationship between stakeholders. Forte, who has examined the social and cultural “constructedness” of websites, has written about the process of organising ethnographic data and recorded sounds as the:

product of intense social organization, brokerage and exchange, revealing quite a different story from that may appear on the seemingly placid surface of a site. Websites do not just tell stories; they contain stories within them about themselves.  [Forte 2005, 94]

This idea that a “seemingly placid” website conceals a dynamic and complex creative process that lies beneath also speaks to a more specific definition of what a digital repository is; it is not just a storage site, it is also a place to think through, to imagine what is not present and to interpret what is. Sonic Japan aims to be such a website, communicating these meanings by sharing sounds field-recorded in the sonically intense environments of Japan through a browser-based web application.[2] The site was created by an interdisciplinary team comprised of researchers in anthropology working with a graduate student intern (in the University of Melbourne’s Masters of Information Technology program[3]) who served multiple roles of product manager, designer and web developer (and is hereafter referred to as “the web developer”, even when discussing product and design concerns).

From an academic perspective, this project required a web presence because the researchers wanted a digital format for a broader audience and to provide a more immersive and holistic view of sonic practice through multimedia, including audio, text, and images. This requirement echoes a call from researchers in the digital humanities who wish to challenge “the primacy of text” to produce “an expanded concept of the sensorium of humanistic knowledge”  [Burdick et al. 2012, 121]. Scholars such as Bellamy [Bellamy 2012] and Murray and Wiercinski [Murray and Wiercinski 2014]have described digital humanities projects in terms of the ways in which software practitioners build tools for humanities scholars in the earlier “input” phases of the research cycle. Yet, Sonic Japan can be understood as a digital research output which demonstrates the intersection of utility (in terms of its educative dissemination of research findings) and art (as a creative and expressive product).

This article explores what was learned about web development, anthropology and interdisciplinary collaboration as the web developer and anthropologists came to work together. Web developers and academics both work within standard constraints such as time, budget and role management. The anthropologists, however, had to reconceptualise the way they viewed their data to produce Sonic Japan. For instance, rather than merely writing up their impressions of the field and adding analytic comments, they had to ask themselves new questions regarding information and ethical considerations, such as: What metadata needs to be attached to the sound files to be meaningfully understood in a digital domain? How do ethical requirements regarding privacy and anonymity in human research interface with the precision of digital representation in terms of mapping and description?

For the developer, on the other hand, the challenges around the translation and interpretation of data in the digital realm were not unique, because software engineers routinely work with non-specialists. Rather, her challenge was to effectively act as a “knowledge broker” between the academics, their data, the software, and a public audience. Meyer defines knowledge brokers as those who “facilitate the creation, sharing, and use of knowledge”; they also “establish and maintain links between researchers and their audience” and “link know-how, know-why, and know-who [...] in the public domain as much as in the private domain” [Meyer 2010, 119]. This definition was an apt one for the web developer, who was focussed on taking the anthropologists’ data to a lay audience via the website, a distinct task outside the anthropologists’ comfort zone of writing for academic audiences.

As in often the case in independent study projects, the web developer took on the project with vague goals, no clear workflow and no budget to be completed within the 12-week internship period. Despite this, she used an iterative development style called Agile to overcome some of these obstacles and was able to launch a prototype site within the timeframe. Presenting initial user interface prototypes to the anthropologists helped expose further goals and design questions. Bugs emerging during the implementation of a content management system for Sonic Japan’s sounds also invited a re-examination of code and engineering methodology. Later on, deployment on the web led the developer to re-evaluate product development methodology, design decisions and project priorities. While the anthropologists had no experience with the startup mantra of “fail fast, fail often” (and were generally frightened at the thought of visible failure!), they soon found that the refrain certainly applied in the anthropology domain, and had undeniable benefits.

In the first part of this article we outline the gaps emerging when the two fields of web development and anthropology collaborated on this project. Then, we discuss the application of web development methodologies for Sonic Japan, focusing on design questions and the critical intersection between the interdisciplinary teams’ various definitions of “success” through prototyping and iteration. Lastly, we reflect on the hindrances and opportunities that emerged from our interdisciplinary partnership, using the metaphor of a “bad gateway” for the learning experience.

Anthropology sits somewhere between the social sciences and the humanities, and since the 1980s has been known for its reflexive and critical gaze. Ingold notes that

[p]erhaps uniquely among academic disciplines, anthropology thrives on the art of its own perpetual deconstruction. Caught at the intersection of two cross-cutting tensions, between the humanities and the natural sciences on the one hand, and between theoretical speculation and lived experience on the other, it leaves little room for intellectual complacency.  [Ingold 1994, xii]

On the other hand, web development is more concerned with synthesis than analysis, particularly the synthesis of tools and systems to solve problems. Developing Sonic Japan prompted both anthropologist and developer team members to rethink their definition of “data”. In object-oriented programming, data is typically a series of fields or attributes which together form an object analogous to a real-world concept. For example, an employee in X Department with salary Y, position Z and employee number 12345; this collection of attributes creates an instance of an Employee. Of course, the employee’s humanity is more complex than that, but a computer “thinks” only in ones and zeroes, and data must be parceled into discrete units for the machine to process. Thus, in computer science, data is a specific type of approximation of empirical reality. An object is an abstraction to the developer. Software engineering feeds on discovering abstractions, which form the basis of flexible, maintainable systems.

In winnowing down a complex world to one of binaries, or of fields and objects, the representation of nuanced ideas can be limited. Compared to software engineers, anthropologists see their data as constantly constructed, contextualised and contested in time, in space, and by the individuals involved as demonstrated through differences in language, sociocultural position and value. Categories are not so objectively defined, and often have blurred boundaries. Schreibman, Sievers and Unsworth note that collaboration in the digital humanities brings to light these differences, especially in the case of what they call “knowledge-bearing artifacts”:

The process of such representation – especially so when done with the attention to detail and the consistency demanded by the computing environment – requires humanists to make explicit what they know about their material and to understand the ways in which that material exceeds or escapes representation.  [Schreibman et al. 2004]

In this case, the web design and development process pushed the anthropologists to re-evaluate their data not only in terms of its content and communicative impact, but also what they themselves understood about their relationship to the data and how that relationship shaped its presentation and meaning. For example, one of the initial design proposals was to situate each sound as a marker on an interactive map, using the Google Maps API. Some sounds recorded in-place could be attributed to a single latitude and longitude point, but what of a sound recorded in motion? What of sounds recorded at the same site, but at different times? The anthropologists, as experts in ethnographic writing, had less experience in thinking about how best to organise and present the complexity of their material in ways other than text. However, the web developer faced the challenge of translating and ordering anthropological data into a version appropriate for a computer to manipulate, without sacrificing too much of the data’s cultural significance and analytic potential. Specifically, the anthropological data had to be modeled into objects with fields and data types to introduce enough abstraction to create a flexible system. Because the researchers had “been there” when the data was recorded, they often had very specific ideas about how it should be presented, and these requirements were not always logical to a developer aiming to design a web system based on repeat functionality through abstraction.

The idea of a sonic-focused website was inspired by a rich body of research in anthropology. In the past few decades, a “somatic turn” in the humanities and social sciences has inspired an internationally recognised field of sensory anthropology, which rightly points out an over-reliance on the visual and the auditory in anthropology [Classen et al. 1994] [Howes 2003]. Erlmann noted that even for those writing about sound, instead of examining “scores or meanings that are the result of acts of inscription”, we should “instead focus...on the materiality of...communication [and] issues of sensuality.”  [Erlmann 2004, 2]. How to best achieve this, however, has puzzled social scientists for generations. Charles Seeger, the forefather of American ethnomusicology, addressed these limitations of text and declared that speech and music are incompatible as modes of communication and indeed that we should be musicking about music [Seeger 1977, 179]. It follows that we should be “sounding” about sound more generally.

Thus, by emphasising sound, the anthropologists in this project hoped to encourage the user to focus on and think critically about auditory details and how sound is produced, linking the sound to action and in some cases intent. They thought a focus on sound might also help to take the user out of his or her visual and intellectual “comfort zone” by destabilising the sensory focus of the experience, opening up new channels for interpreting cultural information. We can never fully share a sensory moment, but can help our audiences imagine that moment with the aid of a number of sensory and other cues [Kohn 19994, 25].

To support the reception of aural data, we considered a variety of visualisation methods to portray sound through a browser-based user interface. In fact, Sonic Japan joins a tradition of digital projects – arising from sensory anthropology, urban studies, ecoacoustics, sound art and even technology startups – that present sound recordings through the web and mobile apps. For example, repositories of user-uploaded sound recordings like Soundcloud or Foundbite make sounds – including field recordings – accessible with search and social features. Archivists like those at the British Library have also undertaken this endeavour. On the browser, geographic sound maps (like the MoMA Sound Map or the University of Turin/Bell Labs’s Chatty Maps), interactive graphs[4] or video game-like experiences (like Sounds of Street View) create highly interactive, multi-sensory experiences of sound that depart from the ‘primacy of text’, capitalise on browser technology and invite engagement from broader audiences. However, the researchers noted that these technologies often fail to provide anthropological context, and were impressed with sound blogs like the Sensory Studies Sound Gallery which pair sound recordings with ethnographic description.[5] Ultimately, the Sonic Japan team decided that it wanted a product with the voice and context of a blog, the spatiality of a soundmap, the searchability of a Soundcloud and the interactivity of a graph or immersive experience, aiming for a holistic representation reinforcing our view that sound is a complex whole.

The Sonic Japan project could be seen as a “gateway” which sought to combine both the goals and processes of the two disciplines involved. Our process was as following: After initial discussion of the anthropologists’ requirements — which at times appeared nebulous and difficult-to-measure to the web developer — she started designing with pen-and-paper drawings, later expanding to build mock-ups and dummy prototypes. She then developed working prototypes, concentrating on small segments of functionality, which were critically reviewed by the anthropologists as well as university IT advisors. By participating in design and examination of prototypes, all the team members were encouraged to think with empathy about the user, refine the story they wanted to tell, and consider the implications of varying visual communication choices.

The anthropologists often found the Agile style confusing because of the wealth of possibilities and multiple and frequent decisions about which direction to take. This recalls Schreibman, Sievers and Unsworth’s comment on how collaboration with computer scientists pushes humanities scholars out of their comfort zone [Schreibman et al. 2004]. Moreover, prototyping revealed design questions that provoked the anthropologists to defend their choices of subject matter, and claims of relevance to a wider audience. In many ways, this validated the Agile style as we felt we were moving quickly toward a stronger product by examining its actual sensory effect, though we lacked the financial resources to conduct real user testing. Overall, we sought to strike a balance between user-focused design and the presentation of academic ideas, with a revealing dialogue emerging as a result.

How scholars study the social world — how they see the world, how they record it, how they relate their version of the world to others, and how readers react to the stories presented by others — is increasingly mediated through communication technologies. These technologies afford new ways of capturing and sharing ideas, creating a new record of social life that that can be conceived as truly “beyond the text”. Technologies do not just mediate the outcomes, however; they have the potential to frame inquiry from the start into new and exciting territory, encompassing the sensorial experience (albeit a mediated one) that the text cannot always deliver.

This article has charted the ups and downs of an ongoing collaboration between anthropologists and web developers and how brokerage led to problem solving; it also demonstrates that provides an opportunity for us to think about the ways in interdisciplinary research advances in stops and starts rather than in smooth progression which we move forward in this relationship. As a case study in interdisciplinary collaboration in the digital humanities, Sonic Japan provided an opportunity for web developers and anthropologists — despite their differences in their definition of data, goals, disciplinary values and methodology — to create new knowledge. While these differences may lead to friction, confusion and errors when developing a web application, they can also lead to positive outcomes. The interdisciplinary nature of the Sonic Japan project prompted new ways of thinking for team members in both web development and anthropology research, as the design and development process brought a host of challenges to light. These challenges spanned design issues as well as methodology. The anthropologists grappled with the best way to represent their data in the web medium, struggling with the need to monitor their level of curation and maintain location privacy in an ethical way. Meanwhile, the web developer sought to bring the anthropologists’ research practices within methodological frameworks of product management and software engineering, despite their preference for flexibility. Rapid prototyping and testing revealed issues anthropological, technical and even managerial, demonstrating the value in continuous iteration for this interdisciplinary exercise. Thus, our experience creating Sonic Japan can serve as an illustrative example of an interdisciplinary developmental process. We speak to our case study as a transformative journey rather than a destination, a journey that traversed various disciplinary “gateways”.