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I had the privilege of chairing the closing keynote of the 2026 IIPC Web Archiving Conference in Brussels, hosted at the grand KBR (Royal Library of Belgium) . The panel I convened brought a fresh angle to a community traditionally rooted in cultural heritage: using web archiving for open source investigations and accountability. It’s a perspective that doesn’t often share a stage with…
I was back in Perugia this April for the International Journalism Festival, this time as part of a small group co-hosting a closed-door side event called Bridging Journalism and Justice . Starling Lab co-organised it alongside Airwars , IrpiMedia , Paper Trail Media , and Videre . The room gathered journalists, investigators, and lawyers. The question we came in with was narrow and practical: what…
Last month, Wikipedia banned Archive.today and began removing close to 700,000 citation links . The reason was forensic evidence that the service had been quietly altering its own archived captures. As hard as it is to believe… Archive.today was the if-you-know-you-know resource for journalists and fact-checkers. Its operators were always anonymous , which felt like… a quirk, not a…
I’m looking forward to returning to Perugia for the International Journalism Festival and the stimulating discussions and encounters it brings about every year. This year I’ll be part of a panel on “Witness to War: How Journalists Can Safeguard Digital Evidence for Justice” , alongside Emily Tripp of the Starling Lab , Frederik Obermaier of paper trail media , and Rebecca…
The UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism Professor Ben Saul has published a new position paper: Protecting Human Rights while Using Artificial Intelligence to Counter Terrorism – a realy interesting read on how to ensure AI systems protect rather than endanger rights. I’m really proud to see my submission referenced in there. I argued for a proactively designed system for authenticity…
I am excited to share a new article published on Opinio Juris, co-authored with Sabrina Rewald , Emma Irving , and Kate Keator . As generative AI reshapes the digital landscape, legal frameworks are struggling to keep pace. In our piece, “When Tech Disrupts Faster Than Rules Adapt,” we address the urgent need for updated standards in digital investigations. Drawing on collaboration…
Originally published at Nieman Lab . “They all understand that in a world of infinite synthetic supply, proven reality is the only scarce asset left. And it is worth paying for. So journalism must pivot slightly. We can’t just be storytellers; we must be a part of the chain of custody for truth.”
I recently had the incredible opportunity to participate in a mock trial at the Inner Temple in London ( see previous blog about the training). This wasn’t just any mock trial; it was a specialised training session for British barristers focused on the authentication of open-source intelligence (OSINT) and the emerging C2PA standard. The goal was to see how these new forms of digital…
The content authenticity ecosystem is experiencing unprecedented growth and evolution. With the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) now boasting over 5,000 members and C2PA specifications maturing rapidly, keeping pace with developments across multiple working groups, technical specifications, and industry implementations has become increasingly challenging. As someone working at the…
I am pleased to have been selected to present at the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) annual conference , which took place in April 2025 in Oslo. My talk provides a high-level overview of the work conducted over the past year by the whole team at the Starling Lab for Data Integrity (co-founded and established at Stanford University and the University of Southern California).…
Last year, I worked with the TRUE Project and the Institute for International Legal and Advocacy Training (IILAT) to develop training materials and legal arguments – an experience that shifted how I think about the intersection of technology and justice. The work has (hopefully!) led me toward expert witness roles, and I’m continuing the collaboration with IILAT on a second round of training…
I recently opened a presentation by a short explanation of what it is I do ™️ and how I got here. This is what I came up with:
Originally published at Nieman Lab . “Physical deterioration, outdated formats, publications disappearing, and the relentless advance of technology leave archives vulnerable.”
Originally published at Nieman Lab . “Ethical considerations will be the compass guiding these partnerships, weaving together the principles of truth, accuracy, and public interest from journalism, the expertise of NGOs, and the commitment to fairness and accountability from legal initiatives.”
I am so proud to announce that our team at Starling Lab, alongside partners Hala Systems and DFRLab , has submitted groundbreaking digital evidence to the International Criminal Court (ICC) documenting alleged attacks on schools in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Our submissions, made on June 10, 2022, and January 17, 2023, represent a new approach to preserving and authenticating digital evidence in…
Originally published at Nieman Lab . “I eagerly await the large ‘merchants of truth,’ news organizations that trade on their production of accurate records, marketing their ability to establish provenance and unbroken integrity, from capture to their client’s screen.”
The updated version of The Data Journalism Handbook was published this week – a huge relief for Liliana Bounegru and Jonathan Gray, its editors, who have been working on this for years. I contributed a chapter: “Coding with data in the newsroom” , which you’ll find in the second section, “Working with data” , nicely tucked between Barbara Maseda’s “Text as data: finding stories in text…
🎉 I’m very exited to announce that the Digital Evidence Preservation Toolkit is being funded by the Prototype Fund, a joint venture of the Open Knowledge Foundation and of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research! Every day, dedicated investigative journalists and human rights monitors scour the Web in search of proof of abuse, wrongdoing, and crime. The material they gather is at…
Earlier this week, as I was looking into idiomatic ways of updating a chart, I came across Kaho Cheung ’s d3-render – and boy did I get excited. d3-render packages up a bunch of d3 commands in a declarative shell, inspired by a eather functional and reactive approach. @unkleho has got a lovely tutorial introducing the library, but here’s another one from yours truly anyway.…
Originally published at Nieman Lab . “Traditional narratives assume that publishing online and in print require different workflows, file formats, and so on. But do they?”
An original data-driven experiment looking at how Brexit splits the Tories. Modelling of a dataset to test a hypothesis. Project course The project came to be as a backburner piece for my contribution to the Europe, Middle East and Africa Reuters file: a kind of backgrounder, explainer story we could mention and push out again every once in a while. The central question was whether we could back…
December 2025 Update: I’ve refreshed the data for this analysis. The landscape has changed dramatically—Wikidata’s coverage has improved so much that it now exceeds the Berlin-specific database. See updated numbers below. Here are two datasets documenting Berlin’s Stolpersteine memorial plaques. In 2020, their coverage differed dramatically. Four years later, Wikidata has caught…
A node backend and a modular, reactive front page visualising the UK general election results, as they happened. For Reuters Graphics. Unfortunately, this page was deleted from the internet. Front end: the results page The page was built to be modular, i.e. to work this way: clients must be able to pick and choose which graphics they want, from one of them to all of them, there is only one…
I recently had to complete a technical test for a role I’m interested in. The task: from a story out of the Global Witness website , can you come up with an alternative visualisation? You’ve got two hours. As there were no embed constraints, I figured there was no point in faffing with boilerplate code and scaffolds, so I went down the Observable route to put a chart together.…
An interactive map of natural gas infrastructure in the EU, built with Svelte and d3, for Global Witness. Some context The EU has a rule in place to regulate which electricity and fossil fuel projects it will financially support. These projects include the terminals and pipelines used to import and transport fossil gas – sometimes referred to as natural gas. Under this regulation, selected gas…
So, I’m in France right now, and with this lockdown going on we’re quite restricted on the physical exercise front. Technically we’re allowed to go out for a sweat, but can’t go for longer than an hour a day, and no further than a one-kilometre radius away rom home. With this in mind and for no particular reason I set off to cycle, run, or walk every street in this virtual…
Let’s say things are a little confused over here in Brexit Land. To put it lightly, it has become difficult to explain, or simply to fathom what’s going to happen next. A few months ago I looked at the rift splitting the Conservative Party , but the topic kept nagging me. Obviously the “indicative votes” were a great tool to identify the Brexit “tribes,” as they…
Earlier this year, I released a simple R package (available at basilesimon/noaastorms ) that downloads, cleans and parses NOAA IBtrack data for you. As the NOAA updated its datasets, noaastorms is now using these! How to install library (devtools) install_github ( 'basilesimon/noaastorms' ) Available functions getStorms : Fetch NOAA historical best track storms data > df <- getStorms ( c ( 'EP' ))…
Over the Christmas holidays, I read “Maths Meets Myths: Quantitative Approaches to Ancient Narratives,” from the Springer Understanding Complex Systems collection. The authors present their application of “hard” science techniques to datasets coming from the humanities – mostly large corpus of texts, legends and myths. One paper in particular uses bioinformatics and…
Mapping historical storms data is now a little bit easier. Off the back of this blog , I have authored an R package (available at basilesimon/noaastorms ) that downloads, cleans and parses NOAA IBtrack data for you. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases datasets known as International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship . These datasets are updated regulary and cover…
This is a Christmas present to myself to celebrate 10,000km of commuting on my bicycle: a lovely frame print of all my GPS traces on a home-made map of London. Here’s how I made it. This blog was contributed to R Bloggers Step one: getting Strava data The process has become slightly convoluted in May 2018. In the past, it was possible to download a Strava archive which contained all…
I made a sweet Christmas present for my friend Clément, who cycles far too much. Last year he got himself a nice custom bicycle made and started documenting his travels . So I grabbed the lot and started playing, and I pen-plotted his journeys on postcards. This blog was contributed to R Bloggers Base map First order of business is getting and representing borders of the countries travelled.…
Japan is currently counting the cost of the strongest typhoon to hit its coasts in 25 years. The death toll currently stands at nine, and hundreds were injured. The north western Pacific basin sees many storms, and meteorology agencies release loads of data about climate events such as these. For this example, we are going to use the work of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,…
This year, the OpenVis conference took place in Paris. And it was awesome. Formerly Boston-based, OpenVis made the trip to France and set up shop next to the Tour Eiffel thanks to the support of EM Lyon business school (and of the sponsors), which supported Lynn’s desire to keep the conference alive. Practitioners from around the world are surely grateful for what Lynn and the committee put…
Joy of joys, I am in Italy again. This year again, I came to Perugia for the International Journalism Festival , where I moderated a panel about career paths for news nerds. Or lack thereof, really . I invited Lisa, Nikki and Martin to come for this chat following my teaser Nieman Lab “prediction” from December last year. Here is the reading list we compiled “Interactive…
End of term. No more lectures planned until next year. A few weeks to wait while the students complete their final projects and frantically email me questions. This year was quite different from the last one. Here’s what we covered in the “Advanced Data and Coding” module, part of City University’s Interactive Journalism MA. Module outline We started off by talking about…
Today, we are happy to share the first version of our data visualisation catalogue: a collection of data visualisations created for the Times and Sunday Times, collected together in one place in the hope that what we have learned can be useful to others. Our goal is to compile and showcase the best of our burgeoning data visualisation work, rather than to offer a taxonomy of visual journalism (the…
Originally published at Nieman Lab . “Developers and programmers seem to agonize in similar ways over being promoted away from what they do best — writing code and building things.”
There was quite a bit of excitement in the newsroom when news came in that prime minister Theresa May, contrary to her promises, was calling for a snap election on May 8, 2017. For us, well, that means a slight change of plans. Throwing the forward planning stuff away and focusing on the big event to come. For me, that meant jumping on building our lead graphics for the weeks to come: the poll of…
I was apparently bullied into opening an account on Medium (for the second time). This content is mine, not theirs, so I reproduced it below. Two days ago, many months of hard work by multiple teams in our Technology department came to fruition. At 1am they flipped a switch which added an “s” and a tiny green lock in the address bar when you visit our website, accompanied by a reassuring message:…
I was apparently bullied into opening an account on Medium (for the second time). This content is mine, not theirs, so I reproduced it below. Two days ago, many months of hard work by multiple teams in our Technology department came to fruition. At 1am they flipped a switch which added an “s” and a tiny green lock in the address bar when you visit our website, accompanied by a reassuring message:…
This year, I have the privilege to be teaching at City university, as part of the MA in Interactive Journalism. The Times and the Digital team have been extraordinarily supportive of both the idea and of me taking a few hours on Friday mornings to give my lectures - for which I’m very grateful. “All knowledge should be free” , etc. So, all my presentations and notes are freely…
I never thought I’d talk about football this much, but here you go. I spent the last weeks working on a rather massive piece looking at the January Transfer Window, this time of year where extraordinary sums are spent to convince men to come kick in a ball somewhere else. Read the whole piece and the club-by-club analysis on The Times. Note: you can now register for free and benefit from two…
Originally published at Nieman Lab . “Mass surveillance, interception, and metadata collection is all around the Internet, and HTTPS is the first step we must take to make our readers feel secure.”