SIPSON COMMUNITY CENTRE
6.9 Usage: WideNoise as science platform
As the WideNoise sensing campaign was taking place in Heathrow, the Red team had to report to the EveryAware consortium on the progress and motivation of the
partici-pants. This section describes the way this triggered conflict about what WideNoise was sensing.
The Red team’s progress report described that the Heathrow participants framed the us-age of WideNoise in terms of trying to influence the airport authorities in relation to the third runway expansion. This visibly annoyed the consortium, who suggested that this politically engaged usage was polluting the data. In their vision, the Red team should have enrolled thousands of participants without any explicit agenda so that they would generate neutral data. In my interview, a researcher from the Green team argued that the Red team had blurred the important dividing line between scientist and activist. They suggested the role of scientists should be; that “I will tell you and it’s correct and I will tell you when it is right and I will make sure that if you have something. But it is really in a scien-tific way”. The issue for the Green team was not that the residents had a political agenda but a fear that this would reduce the quality of the data. For them the role of the re-searcher should be to enforce strict data collection protocols. One rere-searcher suggested that the current WideNoise data was too tightly clustered and there was not enough night-time data. The consortium suggested that a rigorous protocol should involve dividing the Heathrow area into grid squares and make the participants take measurements in evenly distributed squares at regular intervals throughout the day and night. The Red team was urged to encourage the participants to get up in the middle of the night, walk to a square some distance from their house to take measurements, even though there was no noise from flights at night (night flights are prohibited). When I asked pragmatic questions such as how large the grid squares needed to be and how many measurements had to be made in each square, I was not given an answer. There appeared to be no established thresholds, yet from the scientist’s perspective, having more data was simply better. This rigour expected of the ‘human’ participants was in stark contrast to the lack of ‘technical’
rigour of the sound calibration of the app. Trying to get people to wake up in the night to take measurements with an uncalibrated device, while there are no aircraft present, felt surreal. It assumed an asymmetric distribution of labour and rigour where the participants were expected to put in a vast amount of work, while the researchers were too busy to calibrate the device.
The engineers of the consortium were trying to associate the WideNoise data with the Eu-ropean noise directive (EuEu-ropean Parliament 2002) that calls for noise maps to be created.
These gridded maps are based on continual traffic noise emanating from static roads. Yet gridded noise maps are not relevant for aircraft, since planes fly quickly along linear routes that ignore urban geography and create loud intermittent noise on the ground. For this reason, aviation noise maps use banded contours to represent ground exposure. Despite the fact that aircraft were clearly the only important source of noise at Heathrow, never-theless the consortium insisted on implementing a grid protocol in Heathrow. In the end the Red team refused to enforce a spatial and temporal grid protocol onto the partici-pants, since it seemed inappropriate for aircraft noise and would violate our relationship with the participants.
The incident identified that the consortium and residents were trying to use WideNoise to sense completely different environmental realities. The ontological clash was between enforcing scientific objectivity in order to connect to a policy directive versus a situated protocol that engaged with local pollution. The problem was that the generic policy direc-tive was not relevant to the Heathrow context and applying it would prevent the residents from carrying out their own protocol based around noise as an issue of concern. In this case, the ontological politics of sensing created a binary opposition between whose real-ity of noise should be sensed.
As the EveryAware research project progressed, the consortium stopped discussing Wide-Noise as an app and it only featured in terms of quantity of data points. Despite not being able to enforce the grid protocol, the consortium continued to use the Heathrow data for behavioural analysis. When I asked explicitly in the final consortium meeting whether the app would be supported in the future, there was silence in the room. The participants of WideNoise were only discussed when they were described as ‘lazy’ for not using the tag-ging function enough. To increase the tagtag-ging usage, the Yellow team developed a new tagging function for WideNoise that automatically suggested tags based on geographi-cal location or slider state. The aim was to analyse how people were using the tagging function and then experiment with different recommendation algorithms to see how tag-ging behaviour changed (Mueller et al. 2013). One researcher explained that the strength of WideNoise was the quantity of perception data it created, which meant it was ‘better’
than other noise monitoring apps that were more accurate but didn’t generate enough perception data. While I had always assumed that the subjective sliders and tagging func-tions were merely meta-data, for most of the consortium, these ‘subjective’ sensors were
the main data source of WideNoise. During one consortium meeting, I raised the issue that the graph about behaviour change did not have any error bars for measurement ac-curacy and I was told that “people learn to guess the correct value of the device”, the suggestion being that the participants will change in relation to the device regardless of whether the device has any relationship with environmental sound pressure.
I was told that before I joined the consortium, that there had been a proposal to present participants with random ‘environmental’ data, to see if they would adjust their behaviour in relation to this data. Essentially, it didn’t matter that the WideNoise numbers were ar-bitrary. Since the consortium enacted WideNoise’s sound data as an a priori ‘objective’
baseline against which human behaviour would be measured, there was no need for er-ror bars for the microphone data. What mattered was demonstrating that people got better at guessing, as a demonstration of a behavioural shift. The Blue and Yellow teams thus shifted WideNoise’s site of causation towards the feedback mechanism of the inter-face, rather than environmental pollution. WideNoise was thus enacted as disconnected from the external world to become a social data laboratory, where test subjects could be studied in terms of universal patterns of human behaviour. This ontological enactment created conflicts with the Heathrow actors. Near the end of the Red team’s collabora-tion with RBWM, the council requested access to the raw WideNoise data generated by their residents in order to produce their own analysis and submit it to the official Airports Commission. Yet the consortium resisted the request for raw data, arguing “why is the [consortium] visualisation not enough for them?”. The consortium had multiple concerns, one of which was that the WideNoise data might be used in a court case and that the consortium might be held legally responsible. A researcher argued, “this project is about monitoring how people’s awareness increases. The measurements should be related to re-ality but I would never use these results in a legal framework”. What is interesting about this quote is the way it suggests that the data should be ‘related to reality’ but somehow not ‘be’ reality. I interpret the quote as a suggestion that the WideNoise deployment was intended to be a laboratory experiment that should not be used to directly transform the world. Academic research is thus framed as a distinct mode of reality that mirrors the world but is separated from it.
The practical impact of this ontological struggle was a protracted process that involved the council having to sign a nondisclosure agreement that prohibited them from using the
data for academic purposes and required them to add disclaimers about data quality. This process made the collaboration with the council slower and more complicated. Once the Red team provided the raw data, the council found duplication errors in the WideNoise dataset that consortium had not noticed. The problem was that RBWM were relying on the data as a critical part of their report to the Airport Commission. The situation was only resolved after emergency technical fixes by the Red and Yellow teams. This incident illustrates an ontological struggle between the Blue team’s conception of the data as universal insights about human awareness that clashed with RBWM’s attempts to access the environmental component of the data to speak about a vibrational and political reality of noise pollution at Heathrow.
This section has highlighted an ontological politics around what WideNoise was sensing.
For the Green team, WideNoise was supposed to be a scientific device with rigorous protocols to relate to EU policy. For the Blue and Yellow teams, WideNoise was a data laboratory for experimenting with user behaviour. For the Red team and Heathrow actors, WideNoise was a means to speak about the dynamics of aircraft noise.