An Introduction to Ethical Open Source Investigation - online

An Introduction to Ethical Open Source Investigation is a two-part methodology course which teaches practical open source skills whilst foregrounding a critical and reflexive approach to open source investigations. You will learn practical skills to evaluate social media content and satellite images, whilst integrating considerations of ethics, care and power.

It’s taught by Ray Adams Row Farr, an open source investigator currently working on the Gaza team of Forensic Architecture. She has been researching and teaching open source investigation in a human rights context for the past six years, including as an investigator at Amnesty International.

This material builds on the University of Cambridge’s Open Source Investigation for Academics course (which was co-designed by Dr Ella McPherson, Ray Adams Row Farr, Nik Yasikov and Laetitia Maurat), inspired by the university’s collaboration with Amnesty International as part of their Digital Verification Corps - an international network of universities where students trained in open source investigation contribute to Amnesty’s human rights fact-finding. 

The emphasis of the course is on learning how to combine a variety of skills into a coherent workflow that can be replicated independently. It's run online and taught interactively — amongst other exercises, across the four days we will work from start to finish on an investigation of your choice.

This exciting opportunity to engage with Open Source Investigation is open to anyone, whether a PhD student, Early Career Researcher, practitioner in the field, academic or interested in using OSI in any part of your work. This is an intensive four day course and there is preparation and follow-up work expected from you. Please note that you are required to attend both parts of this course, the dates are as follows:

PART 1 : Thursday 20th November 2025 and Friday 21st November 2025

Over the first two days of the course, you’ll develop your understanding of what open source is and learn the stages involved in the research. On day one, drawing from relevant case studies, you’ll be introduced to open source research, its potential applications and how to engage with your own wellbeing as a researcher. On day two, we’ll build on this ground work by diving into the stages of an open source investigation, split into collecting and verifying content.

Topics covered:

• What is Open Source Research

• Vicarious Trauma

• Collection

• Verification (chronolocation, reverse image search)

PART 2 : Thursday 27th November 2025 and Friday 28th November 2025

Over second two days of the course, you’ll build on and deepen the practical and theoretical skills learnt in Part 1 by learning geolocation, archiving and data curation, and about digital footprints and ethics more broadly. On Day 1 you’ll build on your practical skills verifying content by learning the processes of chronolocation and geolocation, before moving on to consider how to structure and archive content in an open source investigation. On Day 2, we’ll broaden the discussion and bring together all methodological components discussed so far, to think about ethics in the context of open source investigations. 

Topics covered:

• Geolocation
• Satellite imagery
• Data Curation
• Archiving
• Ethics

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