bluesyemre

• Recent protests, political unrest, and news events have been well documented with digital video and photos posted online on sites like YouTube. As smartphones grow in popularity, this trend will accelerate. Yet it remains difficult to obtain a comprehensive view of contested events from the many individual photos and video accounts. The result is that viewers often draw contradictory conclusions by seeing only parts of the available material. The Rashomon Project is developing an online toolkit that will facilitate rapidly assembly and public review of “Multi-Perspective Chronologies” where many videos are time-aligned and displayed simultaneously. Initial experiments with vanilla iPhone and Android video show that temporal metadata embedded in the digital files can be used to do a very close alignment. Once they are closely aligned, audio signals from video can be processed to further refine the alignment. Such a toolkit will benefit the public, citizen journalists, and ideally courts or commissions charged with investigating disputed incidents. Our goal is to allow the public (potentially hundreds of thousands of viewers) to gain a much better understanding of contested events from user-generated photos and video than is currently possible.

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