Open Source Investigation for Academics

Open Source Investigation for Academics is methodology course run by Cambridge’s Digital Verification Corps, in partnership with Cambridge’s Centre of Governance and Human Rights, Social Sciences Research Methods Programme and Cambridge Digital Humanities, as well as with the Citizen Evidence Lab at Amnesty International.

NB. Places on this module are extremely limited, so please only make a booking if you are able to attend all of the sessions.

• University Students from Tier 1 Departments
• Further details regarding eligibility criteria are available here

Number of sessions: 8

Through lectures and seminars, this eight-week course will introduce participants to the key methods, possibilities and problematics of digital open source investigation. Developed in the human rights and journalism spheres, this methodology is useful for scholars and citizens using open source data such as social media content, online databases and satellite images. Throughout, the course will take a critical and reflexive approach to open source investigation, making space to question and unsettle its norms and practices by drawing from insights across the disciplines and by keeping considerations of ethics and power at the core of our approach.

An 8 week module. Each week will involve up to an hour of pre-recorded content available on Moodle. Alongside this there will be an hour-long interactive Zoom seminar each Tuesday at 5:30pm. This will consist of hands-on, collaborative activities designed to develop your skills and prompt ethical discussions based the content from that week's pre-recorded lecture (which must be worked through and watched before each weekly Zoom session).

Moodle is the 'Virtual Learning Environment' (VLE) that the SSRMP uses to deliver online courses.

SSRMP lecturers use Moodle to make teaching resources available before, during, and/or after classes, and to make announcements and answer questions.

For this reason, it is vital that all SSRMP students enrol onto and explore their course Moodle pages once booking their SSRMP modules via the UTBS, and that they do so before their module begins. Moodle pages for modules should go live around a week before the module commences, but some may be made visible to students, earlier.

For more information, and links to specific Moodle module pages, please visit our website

Click the "Booking" panel on the left-hand sidebar (on a phone, this will be via a link called Booking/Availability near the top of the page).

8 weeks.

• Elements of Social Science Research
• Research Integrity