Leveraging digital forensics and data exploration to understand the creative work of a filmmaker: A case study of Stephen Dwoskin's digital archive

Abstract

This paper aims to establish digital forensics and data exploration as a methodology for supporting archival practice and research into a filmmaker's creative processes. We approach this by exploring the digital legacy hard drives of the late artist Stephen Dwoskin (1939–2012), who is recognised as an influential filmmaker at the forefront of the shift from analogue to digital film production. The research findings of this case study show that digital forensics is effective in extracting a timeline of hard drive activities, data that can be explored to reveal clues about the artist's personal/professional history, stages of creative processes, and technical environment. The paper further demonstrates how this is related to current thinking around user-centred archival workflow and understanding of creative processes. The broader impact of the work for advancing digital archiving and research into creative processes is highlighted, concluding with a discussion of how, going forward, the approach can be coupled with deeper content analysis to reveal what influences editing choices taking place over time.