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.

本文旨在建立数字取证和数据探索，作为一种支持档案实践和电影制作人创作过程研究的方法。我们通过探索已故艺术家斯蒂芬·德沃斯金（Stephen Dwoskin，1939–2012年）的数字遗产硬盘来解决这一问题，后者在从模拟电影到数字电影制作的转变中被公认为是有影响力的电影制片人。该案例研究的研究结果表明，数字取证可以有效地提取硬盘驱动器活动的时间表，可以对数据进行探索以揭示有关艺术家的个人/专业历史，创作过程的阶段以及技术环境的线索。本文进一步展示了这与当前围绕以用户为中心的档案工作流程以及对创意过程的理解之间的关系。