April 24, 2016
In armed conflicts of the past, the “fog of war” meant a lack of data. In the era of ubiquitous pocket-sized cameras, it often means an information overload.
Four years ago, when analysts at the non-profit Carter Center began using YouTube videos to analyze the escalating conflicts in Syria and Libya, they found that, in contrast to older wars, it was nearly impossible to keep up with the thousands of clips uploaded every month from the smartphones and cameras of both armed groups and bystanders. “The difference with Syria and Libya is that they’re taking place in a truly connected environment. Everyone is online,” says Chris McNaboe, the manager of the Carter Center’s Syria Mapping Project. “The amount of video coming out was overwhelming…There have been more minutes of video from Syria than there have been minutes of real time.”
To handle that flood of digital footage, his team has been testing a tool called Montage. Montage was built by thehuman rights-focused tech incubator Jigsaw, the subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet that was formerly known as a Google Ideas, to sort, map, and tag video evidence from conflict zones. Over the last few months, it allowed six Carter Center analysts to categorize video coming out of Syria-identifying government forces and each of the slew of armed opposition groups, recording the appearance of different armaments and vehicles, and keeping all of that data carefully marked with time stamps and locations to create a searchable, sortable and mappable catalog of the Syrian conflict. “Some of our Montage investigations have had over 600 videos in them,” says McNaboe. “Even with a small team we’ve been able to go through days worth of video in a relatively short amount of time.”
There have been more minutes of video from Syria than there have been minutes of real time.CHRIS MCNABOE, MANAGER OF THE CARTER CENTER’S SYRIA MAPPING PROJECT
On Wednesday, Google will release that free, crowdsourced and collaborative video analysis tool to the public. At the same time, the Jigsaw team that created Montage is handing off its development and maintenance to Storyful, the Newscorp-owned media firm that focuses on licensing user-generated video to news outlets. But Montage will remain both a standalone Google web app running on Google’s servers and a Chrome extension designed to add its features to YouTube. Google’s goal is to turn YouTube’s giant collection of user-uploaded data into a resource for analyzing everything from war zones to protests, to enable the extraction of real evidence of human rights violations or social injustice. “It’s especially useful in conflict scenarios where it’s hard to get journalist boots on the ground,” says Justin Kosslyn, a Jigsaw product manager who led Google’s work on Montage. Situations like Syria are “dangerous and chaotic, but there’s still enough connectivity that people are uploading massive amounts of video to the internet. That’s the sweet spot. The data just needs to be curated.”
Click to Open Overlay GalleryA screenshot from Montage, showing how a collection of video watchers can add timecoded tags to a clip. THE CARTER CENTER
The Carter Center, for instance, used Montage’s video analysis to help map the front lines of a long and brutal standoff in the Syrian city of Aleppo, at one point monitoring a government offensive that threatened to fully surround a rebel-held area of the city. More recently, it used the tool to track outbreaks of violence during a ceasefire between the Syrian government and some rebel groups. Partly through that video analysis, the analysts were able to confirm that most of the ceasefire clashes were started by a single Jihadi group, Jabhat al-Nusra, which wasn’t a party to that temporary truce, and thus didn’t represent a breakdown of the agreement. Montage, the Carter Center’s McNaboe says, “was able to change our assessment of what was happening on the ground and provide a more complete picture.”
Google’s partnership with Storyful is an example of the sort of partnerships its skunkworks-like Jigsaw team is designed to forge: As an incubator without the engineering staff to maintain all of its creations, Jigsaw will depend on Storyful’s developers to keep Montage running, along with volunteer contributors after the code is open-sourced sometime before July. And for its part, Storyful hopes the tool will surface a bounty of newsworthy videos that it can help uploaders license to news media. “We see this as a new way to collaborate and work with content creators on storytelling,” says the company’s CEO Rahul Chopra.
Google’s inspiration for a collaborative video analysis tool came out of a Google Ideas summit in New York the company hosted in 2013, where Google staff met with McNaboe and Elliot Higgins, an amateur conflict analyst who had gained a following in the war reporting world for making significant discoveries about the Syrian conflict almost entirely through YouTube analysis. From his home in Leicester, England, Higgins had tracked the use of cluster bombs in residential areas of Syrian cities and spotted Croatian armaments in the hands of Syrian rebels, evidence of covert Saudi Arabian support for the opposition armies. The meeting, says Jigsaw’s Kosslyn, “was the beginning of this realization that Syria was the first YouTube conflict in the way that Vietnam was the first TV conflict.”
Syria was the first YouTube conflict in the way that Vietnam was the first TV conflict.JIGSAW PRODUCT MANAGER JUSTIN KOSSLYN
Higgins told Google’s engineers that he had been organizing notes on hundreds of video clips in a cumbersome spreadsheet, and asked if it were possible to integrate that annotation system directly into YouTube. “I told them ‘it would be great if I could tag this item, that kind of weapon,'” says Higgins, who now runs the investigative journalism site Bellingcat. He says he’s since used Montage for his work, integrating its results with the video verification tool Checkdesk and the data visualization tool Silk. “You can combine all these free tools, and it’s very powerful for the kind of work we’re doing.”
Click to Open Overlay GalleryMontage’s map view, showing videos tagged by location.THE CARTER CENTER
And what does Google get out of Montage? As with other projects Jigsaw worked on like the censorship circumvention tool UProxy and cyberattack protection service Shield, the group maintains that it’s less focused on adding to its parent company Alphabet’s bottom line than on Google’s mission to “make the world’s data accessible and useful”-in this case by digging up key information from the unexplored depths of YouTube. “A tool like Montage makes [YouTube’s] huge amount of data accessible and useful,” says Jigsaw chief of staff Dan Keyserling. “Making sense of large amounts of data is something Google does well.”
One barrier to Montage’s mission, however, comes from Google itself: YouTube’s community guidelines ban “violent or graphic content” and any videos meant to recruit terrorists or celebrate acts of terrorism. Those guidelines do make exceptions for newsworthy uploads. But even so, valuable video evidence is lost to those anti-violence policies, says the Carter Center’s Chris McNaboe. In its current form, Montage works only on YouTube-hosted videos. Since its code will soon be open-source, it could be extended to other video platforms like Facebook or Liveleak, or redesigned to work with offline video. But for now, “if Google takes it down, it’s down,” McNaboe says. “Those are the rules of the game.”
But McNaboe says that YouTube’s wealth of primary source material from conflicts like Syria is already so voluminous that it borders on unmanageable. And he argues that Montage’s most important application is to give maximum impact to the video records of Syrian citizens who are risking their lives to document the violence around them. “People uploading this stuff are doing it for a reason. They want people to know what’s going on,” he says. “It amplifies the voice of the Syrian civilians who are trying to get this information out to the world.”
No comments:
Post a Comment