Lab Activities, Fall 2025
A short summary of what we've been up to recently
Greetings! We’ve met a host of new colleagues and connections in the last few months, and as an action-packed 2025 winds down, we wanted to share a few of the highlights and collaborations happening at Starling Lab:
Journalism programs director Ann Grimes attended the Partnership on AI Summit in San Francisco and led a breakout session with Stanford HAI at the Getty Images sponsored conference: “Growing and Protecting the Creative Economy with AI”.
“Sanctions, Scams, and Deepfakes”, an investigative story by Airwars and IStories, with support from IJ4EU, published in early November. Starling Lab worked with these organizations to capture and preserve web content and Telegram posts, bringing in about 7,500+ web pages crawled; we also published our own case study highlighting the tools and techniques used in assisting this investigation.
Human Rights Program Director Basile Simon joined the newly formed University of Colorado Boulder Visual Evidence Lab, focused on advancing equitable and responsible technology in pursuit of justice, as well as The Reckoning Project’s event at Yale “Catching a War Criminal in the 21st Century”, offering guidance on improving legal processes regarding the use of video and AI tools as evidence.
As our archiving work grows, the Starling Lab team onboarded collections of US declassified battle damage assessments related to claims of 1,500+ civilian casualties (announcement and details to follow), as well as a dataset of photogrammetric and 3D scans of Armenian heritage sites located in Nagorno-Karabakh and at risk of physical degradation. We’re also working with the Armenian Heritage Project to assess their preservation/authentication needs.
Check out one of our recent Dispatch posts offering practical steps to securing records with the USC Digital Repository and their newly-operational Filecoin node.
As we look ahead to 2026, we’re exploring journalism collaborations with Rolling Stone and the BBC, academic partnerships with Goldsmith University’s Centre for Research Architecture, and designing the syllabus for the next Authenticity by Design course at Stanford. We’re also exploring collaborations with several news organizations to preserve and authenticate their archives, allowing them to better utilize their vast collections to serve their communities and constituents.
If you have questions, ideas, or would like to explore how Starling Lab’s work in journalism, law, and archiving can advance your efforts, please get in touch via info@starlinglab.org. Wishing you a happy and peaceful holiday season!
With gratitude,
Basile Simon and the Starling Lab team
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