By Ishaan Jhaveri For over a year, a multidisciplinary team of researchers at Columbia’s Journalism and Engineering schools have been developing an app called VizPol which helps photographers and reporters recognize and classify symbols they see at political events. In developing this tool, we have paid keen attention to symbols…

Is VizPol available to the general public? No. At this point, VizPol is available only to select journalists and researchers who are working on related projects (e.g. covering in-person events, or researching political representation and imagery). If this describes your work and you would like a mobile account for VizPol, please fill out this form. If you…

VizPol is an app designed to provide journalists with contextual information about unfamiliar graphic symbols they may encounter during field reporting, especially during live events, protests, and rallies. By offering journalists some additional information about these symbols (or just alerting them to the fact that a symbol may have broader…