Information visualisation through Microsoft Photosynth: Potential for human rights documentation?

ICTs in general 1 Minute

The video below really says it all. Sadly, Photosynth does not yet run natively on a Mac, but the concept behind this information visualisation is astounding. 

I’ve been following Photosynth’s development for a while (this TED video is a very early version – the programme now has more models and more features) and the potential this already demonstrates to change the way we see and manage digital visual data is quite remarkable. 

Just imagine how useful this technology would be in documenting sites of genocide, human rights violations or just neighbourhoods, places and communities at risk. A large problem of field level HR monitoring and violations logging is the lack of precise geographical coordinates (see earlier post on Geo-location and human rights) as well as, in many instances, a total lack of visual documentation.

A system that integrates Photosynth into its location database can over time create powerful visualisations of location data (from mapping the physical environs to complex walk-throughs of incident locations) that can help in HR protection, advocacy, activism and even in legal proceedings.

Using devices like an iPhone (that geo-codes photos taken), the Ricoh 500SE, a product like Eye-Fi Explore or even through geo-coding photos on Flickr (works great for batches of older digital photos or those that have been scanned in) you can get a wealth of image data to buttress other event and processual data related to HR abuses to create databases of great depth and scope.

This is something I’ll be both looking at closely and pursuing in my own work.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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7 thoughts on “Information visualisation through Microsoft Photosynth: Potential for human rights documentation?”

  1. A while back, I forget where, I read about a prototype mobile phone application which enabled phones to orient themselves to one another using BT/GIS.

    It was touted as some civil society, peer-to-peer counter surveillance system for use in collating media taken from multiple sources at a single event. The idea is that the phone would know what not just the xy but the rotation, aspect and direction the camera was taking a photo.

    This would, apparantly, provide enough data to a pic to be able to assemble a three dimensional diorama of an event, similar to Photosynth.

    Wonder if it ever got off the ground, or died under its own geekery.

  3. Will attempt to find the article. Fascinating idea, though it fails on your lowest-common-denomenator-for-mobile-phone-apps test.

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