We prototype tools and principles to build trust in the authenticity of digital records.
Celebrating 8 Years of Research
Starling Labs is the first academic center dedicated to exploring how decentralized web technology can transform human rights.
Highlights
“A moonshot project to preserve the world’s most important information.”
Fast Company
March 30, 2022
Highlights
Opinion:Photos are disappearing, one archive at a time.
Kira Pollack, Starling Fellow in Washington Post
March 10, 2025
Highlights
Predictions for Journalism 2026:“If confusion is the commodity, certainty is the premium product.”
Basile Simon, Starling Director in NiemanLab
December 2025
Highlights
Exclusive:A crypto-based dossier could help prove Russia committed war crimes.
CNN
June 10, 2022
Areas of Practice
01.
Journalism
Supporting legal proceedings with verifiable digital evidence that maintains integrity throughout the chain of custody.
02.
History
Building public trust in news media by providing clarity on the provenance and context of digital records.
03.
Law
Ensuring that important testimonies and stories of human history are never lost to time or manipulation.
Research & Teaching
Starling leads by teaching and applying the Starling Framework and our “authenticity by design” methodology.
We convene academics, practitioners and industry affiliates
Why do we need data integrity?
We need new solutions to create trust in digital records. More than ever.
In 18 months AI has generated...
Time to 15 billion images
Starling Framework
Editor's Pick
Immersive Worlds for Documentary Filmmaking
Artificial intelligence is increasingly sophisticated in creating, understanding, and interacting in 3D environments. Also known as "spatial intelligence," this emerging field is being pioneered by world-class researchers and engineers around the world. As our own contribution to the field, Starling fellow Fred Grinstein has begun to explore how this use of generative AI might be applied to documentary filmmaking and non-fiction narrative works to engage audiences.
Featured Case Studies
Preserving History in the Age of AI: The Christopher Morris Panama Archive
How the Authenticated Attributes protocol creates an immutable 'web of context' to save a generation of photojournalism from being lost to…
Beyond the Blackout: Documenting Atrocities in Tigray’s Forgotten War
Despite severed communications and infrastructure destruction, local journalists and healthcare professionals risked their lives to collect…
Preserving the Shoah’s Memory with Web3
The USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive holds over 55,000 video testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust.
Setting the Record Straight in Brazil’s Burning Wetlands
Documenting the devastation of Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, this story showcases a collaboration between a writer, a photojournalist, and…