Sam Dubberley, Author at Citizen Evidence Lab

Biography

Sam Dubberley is the head of Amnesty’s Evidence Lab. He has been with Amnesty since 2016, when he joined to set up and manage the Digital Verification Corps in the Crisis Response Team. The DVC is now a partnership between six global universities contributing directly to Amnesty’s open source research. The project was awarded international collaboration of the year at the Times Higher Education awards in 2019, and the innovative teaching award from the University of Cambridge in 2021.

Sam has conducted and led on a wide range of open source research for Amnesty International, including the 2021 Webby Award-winning platform “Teargas: An Investigation”.

Sam is a fellow of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex, where he is also a research consultant for their Human Rights Big Data and Technology Project, and has been fellow of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Colombia University. He has published research into the impact of open source investigation and vicarious trauma and is the co-editor of the book ‘Digital Witness: Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation, and Accountability’ published by Oxford University Press in January 2020.

He serves on the advisory boards of the Syrian Archive and the University of California Network for Human Rights and Digital Fact-Finding.

More from this author

Case Studies

How we corroborated eyewitness testimony to show Russia carried out unlawful attacks in north-west Syria

The report ‘Nowhere is safe for us’ documents attacks on schools and hospitals in towns and villages in Idlib, western Aleppo, and north-western Hama governorates in Syria from December 2019 to March 2020. These attacks, carried out by Syrian and Russian government forces, entailed a myriad of serious violations of international humanitarian law. It takes a team effort and collaboration between different experts to collate, corroborate and confirm evidence of war crimes. This blogpost…

May 14, 2020
Digital Verification, How To, Tools

Creating a Panorama from a Video for Geolocation and Self-care

Tutorial on building a single panorama image from a video can help with verification in order to protect from repeatedly viewing the most traumatic parts of a video Tools needed: Screengrab tool [such as Jing], presentation software package [Keynote, Powerpoint, Google Slides or similar], open source satellite imagery from Google Earth Pro or satellite mode…

December 10, 2019
Digital Verification, Stories

The Digital Verification Corps: Amnesty International’s Volunteers for the Age of Social Media

Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps (DVC) was set up in 2016 to address three main challenges. First, how can Amnesty find new ways to engage volunteers in the 21st century, in a way that their efforts make real, meaningful contributions to the protection of human rights in the digital age. Second, how can Amnesty confront…

December 6, 2019
Case Studies, Digital Verification

In the Firing Line: How Amnesty’s Digital Verification Corps changed official narratives through open source investigation

On April 14th 2017, a shooting occurred at the Manus Island Detention Centre in Papua New Guinea, where over 800 refugees and asylum seeker are detained by the Australian government. There were media reports that shots had been fired into the Centre — endangering the lives of those detained there. Manus Province police commissioner David Yapu didn’t…

May 18, 2017
Digital Verification, Stories

Embarking on the path of verification

Here at the Citizen Evidence Lab we’re pleased to announce the launch of Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps. This initiative is being launched with Human Rights Centers at three universities. The University of California, Berkeley in the USA; the University of Essex in the UK and the University of Pretoria in South Africa. The goal…

October 6, 2016