The cultural labor of surveillance: video forensics,computational objectivity,and the production of visual evidence

This essay argues that the status of video evidence as an index of real events—a sign or representation that offers a direct, empirical connection to material reality—is the result of an intentional process of production. This process involves the repurposing of new technologies borrowed from the domain of creative media production in order to transform a chaotic field of raw surveillance video into useable evidence. In addition to the exchange in technologies, an unavoidable epistemological and interpretive exchange takes place between evidentiary uses of surveillance video on the one hand, and the now prevalent forms of surveillant narration found in both fictional and reality-based storytelling. But despite this exchange in meanings and technical systems, considerable effort has gone in to establish formal standards for the evidentiary uses of surveillance video that distinguish the discovery of video evidence from the production of creative content. Building on Daston and Gallison's historical study of the prevailing “epistemic virtues” that have defined objectivity over time, I argue that what we see emerging in the field of forensic video analysis, as a means of establishing its scientific and legal status, is a commitment to a new epistemic virtue of “computational objectivity.”