With the vast amount of publicly available data unleashed by the internet's rise, anyone can now document war crimes, track extremist movements, and investigate environmental abuses. This talk will cover how Python tools and developers can accelerate and improve the accessibility of such digital investigations, and hold power to account.
The rise of the internet has driven an explosion in the amount of publicly available data. For those who know where to look, this data can be used to discover things that previously only the intelligence agencies of powerful governments could: today, anyone with an internet connection can document war crimes, track extremist movements, or investigate environmental abuses. These kinds of digital investigations can be both accelerated and made more accessible through the development of open-source software tools. Though the fields of open-source research and open-source software have different origins, they are increasingly converging, and share a common ethos of transparency, reproducibility, and collaboration.
This talk will cover some of the ways Bellingcat and other researchers have used Python in their investigations, the intersection of open-source software and open-source research, and how developers can get involved in open-source research.
