Recent protests, political unrest, and news events have been well documented with digital videos and photos posted online to social media sites such as YouTube. As access to smartphone technologies increases, this trend of capturing and sharing world events in digital formats will only accelerate. Yet as fragmented glimpses shared across divergent networks, it remains difficult to obtain a comprehensive view of contested events, resulting in viewers often drawing uninformed and contradictory conclusions.
To help address this issue, The Rashomon Project is developing an open-source toolkit that can facilitate the rapid assembly and public review of "Video Timelines" where many video and photo perspectives are time-aligned and displayed simultaneously. Their goal is to allow the public to gain a richer understanding of contested events from user-generated video and photo than is currently available online. In many cases, this video evidence is used in criminal court cases that follow protest activities.
Through temporal metadata embedded in the digital files of smartphone videos and photos, audio signals, and manual timeline adjustments according to visual cues, Rashomon have developed the capacity to accurately and quickly synch multiple video perspectives, and display a potentially limitless number of videos on The Rashomon website (with each project receiving its own unique url) which can help to verify the authenticity of footage, reveal more nuanced views into events, and archive videos in a safe, advertising-free space that does not expose the identities of users who upload and participants (when face-blurring is activated).
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