Coming from a journal that has defined what a science article looks like for 150+ years, that's not a throwaway line. It's an admission that the medium itself is shifting underneath us — and it has direct consequences for anyone doing visual investigation work.
The editorial walks through a generational shift in how news and science reach people:
The uncomfortable core of the editorial: "The boundaries between news, opinion and entertainment content are becoming blurred — as is the dividing line between fact and fiction."
That last sentence is the one that matters for us.
When everyone communicates visually and short-form, the bar for being convincing drops and the bar for being verifiable rises.
A rendered image, a drone shot, a 30-second animation — they all feel like evidence. That's their power. It's also their danger. The same visual language that lets us explain a crime scene to a jury in seconds can be used to fake a scene entirely. AI makes that easier every month, and the editorial's own examples (PhD influencers, science creators) sit right next to research documenting "an overwhelming amount of misinformation" on these platforms.
Nature's answer is that institutions need to meet audiences where they are, and platforms need to do more to curb misinformation. Both true. But neither solves the deeper problem: when the medium is visual, how do we tell a trustworthy visual from a persuasive fiction?
That is precisely what visual investigation is for.
Visual investigation is the discipline of making images answerable to reality. It's not about producing pretty pictures — it's about producing pictures whose claims can be traced back to source data:
The Nature editorial is effectively describing a world where every science communicator will need to be a responsible visual communicator. That's the skill we've been building for. The knowledge base exists because this discipline needs shared standards, not individual intuitions.
It validates the bet we've been making:
This is also the answer to something I wrote in the launch post: people learn differently — video, text, interactive. Nature's editorial says the medium is shifting, but the deeper point is that all of these modalities need to be held to the same standard of accuracy and documentation.
If the future of science communication is visual, then visual literacy is no longer a nice-to-have — it's a prerequisite for staying relevant.
For investigators, journalists and human rights documenters, that's an opportunity: the people who can produce trustworthy visuals will be the ones who define what "trustworthy" means.
But it also comes with responsibility. The next time you see a compelling render or a dramatic reconstruction, the question isn't just "does it look right?" — it's "can I check where it came from?"
That's the question this knowledge base exists to answer.
Source: The future of science communication is not an article like this, Nature 654, 8 (2026). doi: 10.1038/d41586-026-01723-1.
]]>In the past week I've been adding a graph visualization of the content, which seems to be a good alternative to the sidebar for navigating the content, and also a fun way to explore the connections between different topics. One thing I really want to finish is the SFM section, because it feels like the combination of QGIS, Blender and SFM is slowly turning into the trifecta of spatial investigation. Giving courses i've also noticed the modality of ways to present information. Some people prefer video, some prefer text, some prefer interactive content. I want to make sure that the knowledge base caters to all these different preferences, and it's one of the things that AI excels at. However it still is a question of getting your hands dirty and I want to make that as easy as possible. I've been working on an addon that teaches Blender from within Blender. There is a lot of pages that need updating but i will fill these as relevant projects come along.
How do we deal with the fact that we can have AI build stuff that is true, but we don't understand? Some things I do not need to know, i do not need to know how a car works to drive it. And if I just want to get from A to B.
Have questions or suggestions? Feel free to reach out through the community channels.
]]>This blog will feature:
I'll be regularly updating this knowledge base with new tutorials, techniques, and resources. Including:
Thank you for joining me on this journey. Let's advance the field of visual investigation together.
Have questions or suggestions? Feel free to reach out through the community channels.
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