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 , 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.

This research explores visualisation of data for working with personal digital archives (PDA). Large scale PDAs, comprising content from several personal hard disk drive images, are not receptive to “open the box and take a look” approaches to appraisal traditionally adopted by analogue archives. By employing a Sunburst visualisation to represent file directory structures, this paper demonstrates that it is possible to gain an “at a glance” comprehension of content organisation and date distribution, whilst concurrently allowing for the dynamic and interactive exploration of information such as usage patterns, content metadata and original order relevant to archival appraisal processes.

Emails, much like communicative genres such as letters that predate them, are a rich source of data for researchers, but they are replete with privacy considerations. This paper explores the resulting friction between privacy concerns and email data access. Studies of email can often be centred on understanding patterns of behaviour and/or relationships between people or groups, and, as such, embody risks of disclosing private information. This is further amplified in humanities research which is concerned with the individual, their work and the circumstances that influence them. Furthermore, previous studies have expounded upon the benefits of visualisations for researching email data, a method which has been reported both as a path to addressing known concerns, as well as, introducing new concerns in privacy. The spectrum of methodologies leave archivists and curators of email data in a quandary, unable to balance accessibility with privacy. The research presented in this paper contributes a systematic approach to examining the relationship between email visualisation research and privacy. It presents a categorisation of email visualisation attributes, and a graded scale of privacy, to be used in conjunction as a framework for interrogating existing research and their associated email collections. The paper aims to instigate the first steps in concretely situating the extent to which research can take advantage of or is challenged by privacy conscious data management.