Week 11: Exhibit prep

Presenting a recovered (or unrecovered) artifact to an audience that wasn't there for the excavation

17 May 2027

The recovery exhibit is a public-facing presentation, not an internal status report — the audience hasn’t read your notes and doesn’t owe you the benefit of the doubt about what “mostly working” means. This week is about the translation: cutting nine weeks of hex dumps and false starts down to the handful of things a non-expert audience actually needs in order to understand what you found and why it matters.

Presenting a fully working recovery and presenting a well-documented failure take the same care. Either way, the exhibit should let someone who’s never touched the artifact leave knowing what it was, what happened to it, and what you did about that.

Outline#

• who the exhibit is actually for, and what they don’t already know
• choosing the handful of moments that carry the whole story
• presenting a partial or failed recovery without hedging it into mush
• rehearsing the two-minute version before the twelve-minute one