Eyewitness

description

The design objective is to create a platform that embodies the contextual specificity of citizen media visual content (CMVC) that has political and historical significance. This embodiment will be achieved by reconstructing the relation between citizen media content and three notions: the temporal, spatial, and circumstantial dimension of an occurrence, as examined from one or multiple witnesses’ perspective.

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1. Preface 

Citizen media (CM) is defined as “citizen-run, non-profit, independent media projects that may have greater democratic potential” (Mihal, 2003). It is an influential medium that provides communities with the opportunity to create counter narratives of events and empowers marginalized witnesses by giving them means to communicate what they have witnessed (Al-Ani, Mark, Chung, & Jones, 2012).
The role citizen media visual content (CMVC) plays can be examined in light of the Arab Spring. CMVC (videos and photos) generated in the Arab countries that have witnessed the awakening (that started at the end of 2010 and continues until the present) are aesthetically and functionally rich and unique (Elshahed, 2011). The important role the content played (and still plays) derives from an increasing respect for the model of participatory media versus a decreasing one for the traditional authoritarian model (Harkaway, 2012).

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2. Design Problem But the de-contextualization and massive amount (Comninos, 2011) of CMVC among other characteristics, stand in the way of its dissemination, aggregation, and consequently exploration (Harkin, Anderson, Morgan, & Smith, 2012). The obstacles this media faces directly and strongly affect the perception and understanding of its content or in other words the “sense making” of this material.
Executing scenario based methods in studio and reviewing several proceedings from the International conference of Computer Human Interaction CHI (Giaccardi, Churchill, & Liu, 2012; Churchill & Ubois, 2008; House & Churchill, 2008) show that the de-contextualization of citizen generated media content (texts, photos, and videos) is one of the important factors responsible for threatening the content; it stands in the way of its aggregation and exploration. Consequently the content is categorized as data rather than information.
The de-contextualization of citizen generated content ruptures the event from:
a. Time and space, where the occurrence unfolded
b. Other citizen media content, captured in similar time and space of the occurrence
c. Situational circumstances of the witness, meaning his/her emotive conditions