"In the course of the 12 month project, the three main born-digital archives (Kureishi, Moody, MOPA) were accessed, in part preserved, and analysed with digital forensic methods. The main goal was to reconstruct literary writing processes, analyze historical forensic traces of writing processes and writing strategies in digital objects and systems, and contextualize them in the historical development of literary, professional and everyday digital writing.
The forensic analysis of Kureishi’s (""Something to Tell You"", ""The Last Word"", film scripts for ""Le Week-End"") and Moody’s (""The Rebel Code"", ""The Digital Code of Life [...]"") born-digital archives delivered in-depth reconstructions of writing processes, secured traces of individual text processing strategies, legacy software used and forensic traces of the records’ history, provenance and archival processing. Hitherto not forensically described legacy file formats were analysed in this process. Less often documented forensic features that are often destroyed by archival processing, e.g. filesystem metadata granularity and embedded data garbage in document files, have been used during the analysis. The anonymized born-digital records at MOPA, ranging from 1987 till today, including digital files in various legacy formats and early printouts, have been analysed with digital forensic means, which made the digital transformation of the UK with its specific developments (e.g. BBC Micro, preferred formats over time) and elements of writing strategies traceable as element of a grassroots history of this process.
The project was extended by a forensic analysis of the hard drive of C.M. Taylor’s laptop, on which he wrote his novel ""Staying On"" (a British Library preservation project), and the development of a digital forensic, historical perspective on web archives, online threat and open source intelligence.
The beneficiary completed professional training in chip-off forensics, providing him the methodological foundation to extract and preserve NAND-based storage media (e.g. in mobile handsets, solid state drives). Furthermore, in the course of his several investigations, he developed forensic methods to recover and analyse data from legacy computers.
During this project, three academic articles on different digital forensic methods in the humanities and born-digital archives have been submitted and published. The beneficiary also edited the first special issue of the ""International Journal of Digital Humanities"" on ""Born-digital archives"". An article and a book chapter summing up the results are forthcoming. Ten conference papers and invited lectures on digital forensics, born-digital archives and digital literature have been delivered. Three paper abstracts have been published on the conferences’ websites.
The project included organizing the international research workshop ""Born-Digital Archives and Digital Forensics – Where are We Now?"" at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, March 2019.
As part of the project, the beneficiary gave a workshop on digital forensics in the Sussex Humanities Lab Open Workshop series, aimed at archivists, librarians and historical scholars, and a SHL research seminar at University of Sussex.
The beneficiary worked together with the digital preservation units of the involved libraries and archives (The British Library, The Keep, University of Sussex Library) to improve born-digital preservation."
