Between Journalism and Justice: Disciplinary Humility in Open-Source Investigations

Open-source investigations (OSI) have become an increasingly influential method for reporting on conflict, documenting human rights violations, and supporting justice and accountability efforts. As the field has matured, OSI practitioners have increasingly operated across journalistic, legal, human rights, and technical domains, creating innovation and collaboration opportunities, but also disciplinary tensions. Despite growing scholarship on the institutionalization of OSI, less attention has been paid to how practitioners navigate overlapping disciplinary mandates. Drawing on interviews with 35 practitioners involved in OSI across journalism, human rights, law enforcement and specialized investigative organizations, this article examines how disciplinary boundaries are experienced and responded to within justice and accountability contexts. The findings show that practitioners respond to tensions between journalistic and legal norms through forms of boundary recalibration, including recognizing disciplinary limitations and restructuring investigative work. To explain these dynamics, this article introduces disciplinary humility, defined as the recognition of the limits of one’s disciplinary expertise and mandate when operating across overlapping professional jurisdictions. The article contributes to digital journalism scholarship by showing that the OSI institutionalization is shaped not only by hybridity and boundary crossing, but also by boundary recalibration through which practitioners re-examine expertise and mandates across journalistic and legal contexts.