Situated Cameras, Situated Knowledges: Towards an Egocentric Epistemology for Computer Vision

In her influential 1988 paper, Situated Knowledges, Donna Haraway uses vision and perspective as a metaphor to discuss scientific knowledge. Today, egocentric computer vision discusses many of the same issues, except in a literal vision context. In this short position paper, we collapse that metaphor, and explore the interactions between feminist epistemology and egocentric CV as “Egocentric Epistemology.” Using this framework, we argue for the use of qualitative, human-centric methods as a complement to performance benchmarks, to center both the literal and metaphorical perspective of human crowd workers in CV.