Anti-human trafficking work depends on information that arrives in fragments: a job listing with inconsistent details, a tip phoned to a hotline, a payment record that does not match any registered business. Investigators, NGO analysts and compliance teams rarely receive a finished picture. They receive signals, and what happens...
A false claim about a contaminated product line appears on a niche forum at 2 a.m. By the time a communications team sees it flagged in a morning news digest, it has already moved through three platforms, picked up a coordinated push from a cluster of low-follower accounts,...
In January 2020, an image of Australia spread across social media, showing a continent dotted with bright orange, apparently a satellite photograph of a country on fire. It was actually a digital visualization of NASA fire-detection data, complete with a glow effect that a real satellite photograph would not...
During Hurricane Sandy, researchers mapped the sentiment of tweets posted from within the storm's path and found something a simple read-through would have missed: sentiment shifted measurably with distance from the hurricane's center, giving emergency responders a rough proxy for where distress was concentrated in...
In late 2001, Enron's collapse triggered a federal investigation that eventually put the company's internal email archive, more than half a million messages exchanged between employees over several years, into the public record. Read one email at a time, it was an unremarkable stream of corporate...
In 2016, a consortium of journalists sat on 11.5 million leaked documents, 2.6 terabytes of financial and legal records tied to a Panamanian law firm, with no obvious way to make sense of them. Working with Neo4j's graph database and Linkurious' visualization software, the International...
