Geospatial Narratives
Geospatial Narratives is a platform designed to promote critical media literacy in the use of satellite data, developed in response to their increasing narrative role in today's media landscape.
The project examines how satellite data shapes reporting in journalism and beyond, highlighting its potential as a tool for transparency and accountability through investigative research, while equally addressing observed inconsistencies and lack of attribution and contextualisation. By archiving and situating these uses, the platform renders them searchable, comparable and accessible – offering critical reflection and providing references for analysis.
Index: collects examples in which satellite data is used in journalistic and investigative contexts. It aims to trace how such images circulate and seeks to highlight their narrative, political, and media dimensions — while simultaneously filling gaps in public documentation. Rather than reflecting an all-encompassing overview, it represents a curated selection characterized by narrative relevance, linguistic accessibility of the author, and a primary focus on national media outles. I am aware of the limitations of this perspective and welcome suggestions for its expansion.
Article list: brings together a deliberately diverse set of perspectives: from popular science, media-theoretical, and philosophical texts to journalistic reports and analyses by NGOs. It includes books, online articles, essays, interviews, and videos that show how satellite data is utilised in cultural, political, and media discourse.
Glossary: expands the platform with a hybrid vocabulary: a blend of technical and scientific terms, and critical or poetic ideas drawn from fields such as remote sensing, media theory, design research, and philosophy. Some entries give basic definitions of how satellite technologies work, while others offer food for thought — metaphors, conceptual frameworks, or tools to question how we perceive and use these technologies.
Disclaimer: curation on this platform follows an editorial practice: iterative, subjective, open to new perspectives. The selection makes no claim to completeness; rather, it aims to open up a space for interdisciplinary discourse. All entries have been included without prior permission of the authors, publications or media outlets. Requests for removal may be submitted at any time.
Once strictly reserved for military or government agencies, satellite images have become a central visual language of journalism, ranging from illustrative annotation to investigative practices that empirically challenge state and private narratives. Yet their photographic appearance often obscures underlying modes of data production, while scientific embeddedness lends imagery an evidentiary status that is rarely questioned.
Information on sensors, providers, processing methods, resolution, or verification chains is frequently missing or difficult to trace. Classical verification through ground truthing is often inapplicable in investigative contexts; instead, verification increasingly relies on other media that are themselves potentially ambiguous. Structures of truth and reference consequently become destabilised, a development further intensified by AI-generated ‘geographic deepfakes’ which are no longer a hypothetical possibility but an existing reality.
These developments not only intensify the need for verification, but may also undermine confidence in satellite-based evidence as a whole, even in cases where genuine data is used. And while fact-checking departments have now issued guidelines for verifying fake satellite imagery, this highlights a key problem: such contextual information is often incomplete from the outset or is provided inconsistently.
Captions, annotations, and source attributions often merge visually and semantically, complicating citation practices and long-term verifiability – and further fueling mistrust in contexts where journalistic credibility is already coming under increasing pressure.
Scholars from fields such as architecture and media studies, including Laura Kurgan and Lisa Parks, have long argued that these images should be viewed within the context of the technologies and political frameworks that shape them. As Kurgan already noted in 2013: "With every image, we should be able to ask about its technology, its location data, its ownership, its readability, and its source."1
Against this backdrop, “Geospatial Narratives” seeks to respond to this need by exploring how such a framework could be developed to support these requirements.
1 Kurgan, Laura. "Close up at a distance: mapping, technology, and politics." Zone Books, 2013
Information on this platform combines clear details from published articles with the author’s personal interpretations, gained through working with satellite data as a visual and technical medium. While some information can be inferred from the context of the article, specific details — such as the satellite platform or resolution — are often missing, which would make it possible to understand and, ideally, reproduce the use and analysis of the data.
To address these gaps, I draw on publicly available data about satellite capabilities, visual clues within the imagery, and an interpretive sensibility developed through regular engagement with geospatial data.
Provider: the entity responsible for obtaining the data, ranging from commercial companies such as Planet or Vantor (formerly Maxar) to government agencies such as NASA, ESA, or NOAA.
Platform: the satellite (constellation) that collects the data and, based on its sensor capabilities, enables further aspects to be inferred and determined.
Sensor: the instrument(s) used by the platform that determine how data is collected. Sensors differ in terms of their physical operating principles and the part of the electromagnetic spectrum they measure.
Domain: the primary thematic focus of the observation, including: weather (clouds, storms, and precipitation for forecasting purposes); atmosphere (measurements of gases, temperature, and air quality); land (surface changes in vegetation, urban environments, and water bodies) and ocean (sea temperature, water color, waves and currents).
Visualisation: the representation of sensor data for analysis and improved readability, determined by the sensor's available spectral bands and processing applied. The result can be true‑color images (mimicking natural human vision), false‑color images (highlighting features that would otherwise be less visible), or derived indices (calculated by mathematically combining bands to quantify a specific condition).
Resolution: the size of individual pixels, based on the sensor capabilities. This information is rarely mentioned and can also be visually altered through post-processing, resampling, or cropping, making it difficult to identify with precision. To account for this, each resolution is assigned to one of several categories — flexible ranges that take into account differences in sensor types.
This method inevitably involves a certain degree of approximation. However, this margin for interpretation should not be viewed as a shortcoming, but rather as part of the critical reflection: How much do we really know when we look at a satellite image, and what remains hidden or absent?
This platform is an open, collective, and growing resource for studying satellite data as a medium in stories and investigations. It invites contributions that expand the archive and help people understand how satellite data is used, read, and circulated.
Submissions may fall into two categories:
Narrative Use: examples in which satellite data plays a central role in narratives, analyses or reports. These can be news articles, visual studies or artistic works that use satellite data for more than just illustration.
Satellite Literacy: contributions that explore and question the medium itself. This includes both simple explanations and more reflective or speculative ideas. Contributions may cover concepts from fields such as remote sensing, critical geography, design research, media theory or philosophy.
Contributions from different application contexts, regions and cultures are welcome. Only through a variety of perspectives can the narrative potential, inherent biases, and blind spots in the use of satellite data be brought to light. I am also aware of the limitations of my own perspective, which is primarily shaped by Western, English- and German-language media.
Submissions are reviewed for relevance, clarity, and fit with the platform's focus. Images used purely for visual decoration or without critical context may fall outside the archive's scope.
To propose an entry — whether case study, text, or glossary term — or simply to provide feedback, please use the form below or reach out via email.