The instruments Parallax builds for the work.
We build our own instruments for counter-archiving: six small applications, each sharpened for one part of the method. Five are the working tools. The sixth, Casebook, is the case file that holds an investigation together.
They share one language, so a place fixed in one is the same object a witness stands beside in another, and one working interface, in light or dark. Each runs entirely in the browser, on your own machine, with nothing uploaded.
Five for the work, one for the case.
Sightlines
Places photographs and video in space and time. It crosses the sightlines of several images until multiple views of one place fix its position, and aligns several recordings of one moment on a single clock, with a stated error for each. The instrument for reconstructing a single incident or site.
- Resection by crossing sightlines
- Terrain, sun, and shadow
- One clock for many recordings
Atlas
Draws many images of one place, object, or event into a single relational field: a montage plate, a graph of how the pictures relate, a map of where each was taken, and deep-zoom close looking.
- Montage plate and relation graph
- Camera positions on a map
- Deep-zoom close reading
Situated Testimony
Anchors a spoken account to a 3D model and a map, statement by statement, so a witness's words sit in the space they describe. Where a document is missing, placed testimony stands in its stead.
- Testimony bound to a 3D scene
- Statements anchored in place
- Sovereignty over the account
Verification
A workbench for testing whether an image is what it claims to be: the claim, the checks against it, and a reasoned verdict, with tools for locating and dating a picture from its own content.
- Claim, checks, and verdict
- Inverse chronolocation
- Pixel-level forensics
Groundtruth
Compares satellite imagery of one place across time to measure what changed on the ground: vegetation, burn, and built fabric, read date against date.
- Live Sentinel and Landsat retrieval
- Vegetation and burn indices
- Change measured between dates
Casebook
The sixth binds the other five. It gathers their finished work into one investigation, on a shared map, timeline, and register of findings, and publishes the whole as a single page.
- One map, synced timeline, and findings register
- Each source bound by its hash
- One consent-cleared dossier
How they fit together.
Each working tool exports its findings in the same format. Casebook reads those exports, lays them on one map and timeline, and can also open a fresh piece of work in any tool already filled in with what the case knows. An investigation moves from a single instrument to a whole case, and out again as one publishable account.
Local-first, and tethered to the evidence.
Every instrument runs in your browser and keeps the same discipline. Each source is fingerprinted with sha-256 and holds its provenance, so the account stays tethered to what it came from, and every finding cites the sources that support it, with a stated certainty.
The same architecture protects the people and places in the work: restricted material, the identities of sources, and unsafe locations are withheld from anything published, by the design itself rather than by anyone's vigilance. Before any release goes out, a test publishes the tool's sample case and searches the result for the private details it must withhold; a single hit stops the release. Nothing is uploaded, and nothing sensitive crosses into a published record by accident.