I do research in evidentiary standards and cryptographic authentication of evidence for Stanford University’s Starling Lab.
I come from a background of information design and creative technologist, and I’m based in Berlin–though I miss the mountains.
📬 Contact
- ✉️
basile-at-stanford-dot-eduorbasile-at-basilesimon-dot-fr🔐 PGP - 📞
+49 172 253 9671(Signal/Telegram) - 🔗
@basilesimonon some social platforms (incl. Mastodon)
/now
The freedom I draw from self-employment is really important to me. My varied interest and work strands don’t make for a snappy soundbite over a family holiday meal, however. Ah well–can’t please everybody. Here’s a short summary of what I’m up to:
Lead the Legal and Accountability lab. Focus on the evidentiary value of integrity and authenticity data e.g. C2PA and Verifiable Credentials. OSI verification, U.S. federal authentication rules. Preservation of at-risk collections of evidence.
Consultant technologist and sysadmin to the Data Investigations team. Advise investigative reporting initiatives on workflow and technical, cloud-based resources. IAM policies, lambdas, information design, chasing whitespace chars in Ansible.
misc
Advisory board at Airwars on technical and architectural matters; technical advisor to the Hala Protocol on Audio. Resident at ECCHR and Investigative Commons.
Freelance work with TBIJ, Correctiv, Tactical Tech, Dot•Studio, among others.
👔 Past employment
My journalism career started in the UK, where I worked for large broadcasters, newspapers, and agencies:
- Graphics editor, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Reuters
- Senior interactive journalist, The Times and The Sunday Times
- Newsroom developer, The Times and the Sunday Times
- Coder-journalist, BBC News Labs
I also co-founded Airwars, a non-profit monitoring organisation exposing the harm done to civilians by air conflicts.
Portfolio
For Prototype Fund:
The Digital Evidence Toolkit
Public/private 50,000€ grant for the r&d of proof-of-concept techniques highlighting the uncertain legal framework of digital evidence admissibility and chain of custody.
🔗 See the piece
👉 Read all about it
Typescript
Svelte
Grant
For Global Witness:
The “Pipedown” map
A short contract bringing to life the dataset on which GW’s campaign was based, modular once again, and published both from the CMS and as a standalone.
🔗 See the piece
👉 Read all about it
Visualisation
Cartography
D3
Svelte
NGO
For Reuters:
Brexit through machine learning
A data-driven experiment looking at how Brexit splits the Tories. Don’t miss the even-nerdier, machine learning-driven complement.
🔗 See the piece
👉 Read all about it
Visualisation
R
Data modelling
Scraping
For Christmas:
Pen plotter maps
Pen-plotted bicycle journeys on postcards, from a minimal implementation of GPX in R.
Visualisation
R
Pen plotter
reuters.com
reuters.com
reuters.com
reuters.com
reuters.com
reuters.com
reuters.com
reuters.com
reuters.com
reuters.com
thetimes.co.uk
Open source work
Fortunately I was able to open-source some of the work I have done:
deptoolkit
An archiving software demonstrating chain of custody based on an immutable ledger
on github
twitter-tools
A Python toolkit to monitor deleted tweets, automate screenshoting, and archiving
on github
The Times' Dataviz catalogue
A public resource of data viz code and designs, a la Storybook/ FT Visual Vocabulary
on github🎓 Academic work
Since early 2024, I have been a Fellow with Stanford Electrical Engineering professor Tsachy Weissman, pursuing original research in respectful sharing mechanisms of strongly-authenticated digital evidence and verification tools between civil society organisations and UN mechanisms.
Before I joined Stanford, I had the privilege of teaching the Advanced
Data and Coding module on the MA in Interactive Journalism course at
City University London. We ran through an introduction to programming,
statistical methods, R data analysis and modelling with ggplot.
My teaching notes are
available on Github.
Degrees, etc.:
- Master of Arts in Multimedia Journalism - Univ. of Westminster (UK)
- Masters in Political Science and Sociology - High European Studies Institute (France)
- BA Private Law, minor Political Science - Univ. Lyon III (France)
🏅 Awards
Award of Excellence, 2019, Society of News Design
- The Brexit Rift Splitting the Conservative Party
- Not Far Ahead
Long list, 2019, Kantar Information is Beautiful
- Reading the Brexit Tea Leaves
- The Brexit Rift Splitting the Conservative Party
- Not Far Ahead
🎙 Talks and publications
- “Law, Evidence, and Generative AI”
Roundtable for the State Dpt Glocal Criminal Justice, Washington DC, 2024 - “Old and new doubts about verification of open-source imagery from gen AI”
in OpinioJuris, 2024 - “Legal Roundtable on best practices for admissible web archives”
Organised event with Global Justice Advisors, Nicholas Taylor, and the Internet Archive, 2022 - “Working with data in the newsroom”
in The Data Journalism Handbook (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) - “Career paths for news nerds (or lack of them)”
International Journalism Festival 2018, Perugia - “Airwars.org: a field report,two years on”
Hacks/Hackers Berlin 2017 - “Airwars: strike by strike”
Dataharvest 2016, Brussels + Hacks/Hackers Berlin - “Hackers trying to stay relevant: linked data and structured journalism at the BBC”
csv,conf,v2 2016, Berlin - “Passion > compensation”
Sud Web 2016, France - “Hacking the newsroom”
International Journalism Festival 2016, Perugia - “BBC News Labs, Linked Data, Datastringer: the Hacks and Hackers paradigm”
Computation + Journalism Symposium 2014, New York City - “Algorithms in Journalism: danger or opportunity?”
Assises du Journalism 2014, France - “Datastringer: easy dataset monitoring for journalists”
Paper on arXiv (PDF), 2014