Seven months, 40 pages, 50 figures, and many drafts, rewrites, long nights later, Project Tearline at the Global Disinformation Lab at the University of Texas (GDIL) has published its latest report! This will be my final contribution as Task Team Lead with GDIL since joining in Spring of 2022. What follows are reflections, but the article is linked below if you would like to go straight in. For context, Tearline is an open-source publication platform managed by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the Tearline team at GDIL submits original research for publication on this platform with NGA guidance.
I never expected to have GEOINT and OSINT analysis as skills to list, but they were a welcome addition. More importantly, it was the dynamic application of different project management and leadership styles that made this experience stand out. At first, faculty, and later TTLs, dominated the more attractive taskings. Imagery analysis and “detective” leads investigation were left to the discretion of a few, while the undergraduate researchers mainly collected secondary sourcing. We struggled with involving the students as best as we could. Given Tearline’s largely IC audience, undergraduate writing could not match the Analytic Tradecraft Standards expected of IC analysts. Later, as GDIL underwent structural changes, Tearline learned to democratize the flashy work. Undergraduate researchers who showed initiative took on drafting, imagery analysis, and OSINT “detective” work. Student researchers proposed projects they were interested in and pursued those leads as best they could. Once we had an organic draft produced by the team, faculty and NGA revised it, assigning new tasks to make the analysis more robust. Of course, this iteration of GDIL Tearline had its own fair share of challenges, and a few publications did not make it off the launchpad.
But I believe Tearline grew more faithful to GDIL’s overall value-add to undergraduate students. The opportunity to engage in original, faculty-guided research… but more importantly sit in the driver’s seat. Special thanks to Varij Shah for co-leading this report, and to Zachary Daum as our other TTL who's been there from the start. Chris Rasmussen for founding Tearline and providing us the opportunity and NGA guidance to publish with our own names. Sam Rosenberg, Kim Nguyen, Kiril A. for the faculty revisions and guidance along the way. Finally our amazing undergraduate researchers who did a lot of heavy lifting - Gunnison Hays, Nyla Hajj, Beau Chapman, Andrew Paumen, Wyatt K., Suraj Pandit, Eva White.
https://lnkd.in/gxxPP4rY
