Abstract
In the United States, bodycameras have been hailed by both civil-rights organizations and police forces as a source of superior evidence than can curtail excessive police force while protecting officers from spurious claims. Polices guiding their deployment have relied on traditional definition of bodycam footage as public record, and correspondingly focused on conditions of access to and control of the record. This paper applies the theoretical framework developed by the RTP-doc collective to analyze bodycam footage along three different dimensions—formal/material, content/semiotic, and medium/social—to provide a broader picture of the footage as document. The resulting analysis provides the groundwork for stakeholders to devise policies and ethical positions that better account for the multi-dimensional nature of the technology.
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Research supported by an IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian award (#RE4316005316).
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Blanchette, JF., Becker, S. (2018). Bodycam Footage as Document: An Exploratory Analysis. In: Chowdhury, G., McLeod, J., Gillet, V., Willett, P. (eds) Transforming Digital Worlds. iConference 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10766. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78105-1_68
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78105-1_68
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