Who makes Hiddencorners
Three people, on three continents, named. Hiddencorners ran as a one-person publication until August 2026 and said so on every page. It is a small team now, and this is who they are and what each of them is answerable for.
Nobody on this masthead has visited the places we write about. Every dossier is desk research, built from primary sources and labelled as such. We would rather say that plainly than imply field reporting we have not done.
Oeun Sok Heng
Founder, editor-in-chief and creative director
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
On this site: Chooses the subjects, edits and approves every dossier before it is published, and answers for the site itself — the design, the code, and the things that go wrong with them.
Sok Heng founded Hiddencorners and sets what it is for. He works from Phnom Penh, which shapes the archive more than it might appear: the Southeast Asian dossiers — Koh Ker, Tonlé Sap, the Plain of Jars, Tubbataha, the Maliau Basin — are the part of this site written closest to home, and the part where it is most willing to say the standard version is wrong. His rule for the publication is short: no invented figure, no borrowed photograph presented as our own, and no claim that survives here once a reader shows us it is wrong.
Tony Hall
Editorial and AI verification
Chicago, United States
On this site: Reads every dossier line by line against the sources cited for it, and pulls the claims that cannot survive a click.
Tony checks what the machine wrote. Every dossier here is drafted with AI assistance and then verified against its sources, and that second reading is his. He is looking for the confident sentence with nothing behind it. He has found plenty: a pull-quote on our Slims River dossier credited to a university release that does not contain it — it is John Clague speaking to Hakai Magazine, and it now says so; a paper we cited on Žuvintas that turned out to study a different lake; a shelter count at Derinkuyu sourced to a page giving a different number. None were malicious and all were ours. His standard is simple: if a reader clicks a source and does not find the claim there, the article has failed.
Tumnhean
AI visual production, motion and social
Phuket, Thailand
On this site: Generates every illustration on the site, produces the short video and animation, and runs the publication’s social channels.
Tumnhean makes everything you can see and everything that moves. All the imagery on Hiddencorners is AI-created and labelled as such — we hold that line hard — and his job is to make it honest as well as good: the geography recognisable, the light plausible, nothing staged to look like documentary evidence of something that did not happen. Beyond the stills he produces the short-form video and animation that carry these places to people who will never read three thousand words, and he posts and manages the publication across social platforms. Choosing which single fact out of a dossier is the one that stops a scroll is his call, and it is usually the correction rather than the scenery.
YouTube (Lumen History) · Facebook (Lumen History) · Pinterest (Lumen History) · TikTok (Lumen History)
How the work divides
A dossier passes through all three of us before it is published. Sok Heng chooses the subject and decides what the piece is arguing. The draft is written with AI assistance and then checked, claim by claim, against the sources cited for it by Tony. Tumnhean makes the imagery and the short-form video, and takes it to the social channels. Sok Heng approves the finished dossier and is responsible for it once it is live.
If something on this site is wrong, that is on us and we want to know. Corrections are dated and shown in place, and the fastest route is the contact page.