Digital Investigations as Counter-maps? Aesthetic, Epistemic, and Participatory Solidarities in OSINT

From identifying chemical weapons during the war in Syria to tracking movements of the missile launchers that shot down the passenger plane MH17, open source intelligence (OSINT) was embraced amongst social media subcultures in the early 2010s as a disruptive form of collective digital inquiry. Its chief proponents have often emphasised its democratising potential, describing it as a set of techniques "for the people" that could hold state power to account in an era of post-truth and fake news (Higgins, 2021).

However, the aesthetic, epistemic and participatory politics of the OSINT scene have been more critically scrutinised in recent years. Dyer and Ivens (2020), for instance, have called for intersectional feminist approaches to working with open sources, while Patrick Brian Smith (2024) has proposed that "solidarity" with victims of systemic violence should be at the centre of OSINT practices. Given the representational and evidentiary functions of cartography in this field, counter-mapping (Duggan and Gutiérrez-Ujaque, 2025) also offers prompts for how feminist and solidarity-based ethics might be incorporated into how OSINT reckons with a politics of recognition -- that is, the conditions through which victims of violence can be seen, known, and cared for (Sharp, 2024).

Building on the above work, this discussion session seeks to examine the aesthetic, epistemic, and participatory dimensions of open source investigations. In doing so, we will critically examine how a given investigation might simultaneously fail and succeed to function as a counter-map across these respective dimensions. We will ask: what is the role of design and style in OSINT, and what forms of spatial representation should it runcounter to? What kind of "sources" typically gain the status of "evidence" in an investigation, and how does a politics of recognition govern thresholds of inclusion/exclusion? And finally, who is the figure of the investigator, and what relationship do they have with those for whom the investigation is notionally carried out on behalf of?

The session is intended to be an informal space for discussion and knowledge-sharing, serving as an initial phase in the planning of a larger Digital Investigations Lab symposium at King's later this year. It will run from 2-4pm in Macadam Building, Embankment Room (KCL, Strand Campus), and a catered lunch and tea/coffee will be provided.

The event is part of the Digital Investigations Lab programme and is supported by the Centre for Digital Culture.