On Janus and Justice: Archives, Access, and Ethical Use of Video Evidence

Fri, Oct 21, 2016

6:30 PM–8:30 PM

The Skylight Room (9100)

The widespread adoption of body-worn cameras by police officers nationwide has generated nearly equal amounts of kudos and critique. On the one hand, bodycams are hailed as a tool for restoring public trust and increasing accountability and transparency for law enforcement agencies, especially those with a history of civil rights violations. On the other hand, bodycams are decried as part of a slippery panoptic-society slope, invasive of privacy and ineffective as a check on state power. These debates invoke the two-faced Roman god Janus, patron of archives, doorways, and transitional states–and they also largely fail to engage the question of what it means to create and provide long-term access to public records in digital video and other formats that are challenging, costly, and complicated to preserve.

This panel discussion will bring together archivists, activists, and law enforcement agency experts to discuss the challenges of keeping video evidence, and the multiple readings of such evidence in the public and judicial spheres. They will provide historical context for the use of recorded media as evidence in the courts, considerations for ethical use of material that can be violent, disturbing, or otherwise harmful to its viewers and subjects, and a review of the scope and limitations of the open records request process as it applies to new video materials.

For a list of suggested readings, click here.

This event is presented as part of Mediating the Archive, an interdisciplinary research group that focuses on how archival studies dovetail with the scholarly and artistic legacy of queer activism through visual art, film, digital media, and dance. The group is supported by the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research. For more information or to join, email [email protected].

Cosponsored bythe Mediating the Archive Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research

https://vimeo.com/188663065

Participants

Amy Herzog

Amy Herzog is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Queens College and Coordinator of the Film Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is a faculty member in Theatre, Music, Film, and Women’s Studies. She is the author of Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and co-editor, with Carol Vernallis and John Richardson, of The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (Oxford, 2013). With Joe Rollins, she is co-general editor of the journal WSQ. She has published essays on film and popular music, philosophy, pornography, gentrification, parasites, and dioramas [for selected work, see her website]. Her most recent research project centers on a history of peep show arcades in Times Square, New York.

Herzog has also worked as a faculty coleader in the Mediating the Archive research group of the 2014-2016 Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.

​Snowden Becker

Snowden Becker manages the graduate program in media archiving and preservation at UCLA. Her research and teaching focus on the preservation of audiovisual materials as part of our larger cultural heritage. Recent projects include “On the Record, All the Time,” an IMLS-funded National Forum on data management needs for bodycam footage and other forms of recorded evidence, and her forthcoming dissertation, “Keeping the Pieces: Archival Practice and Evidence Management in Law Enforcement.” She earned basic certification from the Texas Association of Property and Evidence Inventory Technicians in 2007. Becker is also a former Secretary of the Board of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and co-founder of the international Home Movie Day event and the nonprofit Center for Home Movies.

​Nicole Martin

Nicole Martin is the Senior Manager of Multimedia Archives and Technology at Human Rights Watch. She teaches Digital Preservation as an adjunct professor at New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. Before working at Human Rights Watch, Nicole was the archivist at the daily television and radio news show, Democracy Now!

​Candace Ming

Candace Ming is the Program Manager/Archivist of the South Side Home Movie Project. She is a graduate of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at New York University. Before joining the South Side Home Movie Project she worked as a Public Records Officer for the New York Police Department designing the infrastructure they would need to archive and store their vast collection of training films. She also worked at the Museum of Modern Art where she worked with Curator Ron Magliozzi and Conservateur Peter Williamson on the newly discovered outtakes of an unreleased Biograph Bert Williams film. Ming researched the lead actress in the film, identified as Odessa Warren Grey.

​Yvonne Ng

Yvonne Ng is the Senior Archivist at WITNESS, where she manages a collection of human rights video and develops training materials on video archiving aimed at activists. She trains on video archiving locally and internationally, and recently taught a new Personal Digital Archiving course at New York University. Before joining WITNESS in 2009, Yvonne worked on the U.S. National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program’s Preserving Digital Public Television project, and at NYU Libraries, New York Public Library, and Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre. She holds an M.A in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU. She is also a member of XFR Collective, a non-profit that provides low-cost preservation services for artists and small organizations.

​Samuel Sinyangwe

Samuel Sinyangwe is a policy analyst and data scientist who works with communities of color to fight systemic racism through cutting-edge policies and strategies. Sam has supported movement activists across the country to collect and use data as a tool for fighting police violence through Mapping Police Violence and to push for comprehensive policy solutions to end police violence through Campaign Zero. Previously, Sam worked at PolicyLink to support a national network of 61 Promise Neighborhoods communities to build cradle-to-career systems of support for low-income families. He also worked with city leaders, youth activists and community organizations develop comprehensive agendas to achieve quality education, health, and justice for young black men. Sam grew up in Orlando, FL, and has been involved in organizing and advocacy since he was in high school. He graduated from Stanford University in 2012, where he studied how race and racism impact the U.S. political system.

Tags
Archives Urbanism Public Space