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Hive mind project archives linguistic and sign languages across America

Created in response to the US Census which has historically misrepresented the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the US, A Counting serves as ‘a vocal portrait of the United States.’ Produced by Ekene Ijeoma and his group Poetic Justice at MIT Media Lab, A Counting is essentially a crowdsourced field recording, in which contributors record themselves counting to 100 in a language or dialect. Each sequence is then edited into its component numbers and reassembled into an audio patchwork, so that each count is rendered in 100 different tongues. The project has operated in communities across New York, Houston, St Louis, Omaha, Ogden and Boston.