SLOP8350: Generation Loss

Copies leave clues. In this course, you will investigate what changes when recordings, images and texts are copied, reconstruct possible histories from incomplete evidence, and decide what is worth preserving.

• media archaeology
• provenance
• information

In the first workshop you will put a page through a photocopier ten times and watch it become unreadable. Beside it sits a digital copy of the same page, made ten times over, byte-for-byte identical to the original.

Generation loss is not inevitable. That is an awkward thing for a course called Generation Loss to admit in week one, and it is where the real question starts: which processes change a copy, what traces those changes leave, and when a trace is good enough evidence to say where something came from.

What you will do

Every Wednesday you work on a specimen. You measure what changed, you argue about what the change proves, and you deposit the result in theClass Copy Archive for a later week to use.

By week six you will reconstruct a family tree of hand-copied texts from the mistakes they share, and name the version nobody in the room has seen — then find out where you were wrong. After that the course tests the method until it breaks: on a replication model, on error-correcting codes, on a restoration that invents detail, and on a provenance record with a hole in it.

Scribal error, perceptual audio coding and recursive resampling are three different tests of the same method, not three examples of one mechanism. The course is careful about that difference, and so is the marking.

Who it is for

Postgraduate students interested in archives, media and evidence. You need to be comfortable reading an argument and using a spreadsheet. No Latin, no virology, no programming and no information theory are assumed — each is introduced where the course needs it, with worked numbers.

A laptop and the files on these pages are all you need. Nothing in the core course requires equipment, paid software, a cloud account or code you write yourself.

How it runs

One-hour lecture Mondays, two-hour workshop Wednesdays, twelve weeks with a break after week six. About eight hours a week including preparation and assessment work. Four assessments: an investigation you design, a reconstruction from evidence, a preservation argument you have to cost, and a five-minute evidence question at the start of every workshop.

Every assessment here can be answered with the evidence does not settle this, where the evidence genuinely does not settle it. Saying so well is worth full marks.

The timetable

Every week pairs a Monday lecture with a Wednesday workshop and a five-minute Generation Check at its start. An assessment's own due date can land after the week it was introduced — worked practice keeps going in the weeks between — so the table below places each one on the week it actually falls due.

Twelve weeks, one Monday lecture and one Wednesday workshop each, plus what is due.

1. Week 124 February 2027

   The office that ate itself

   • Lecture for week 1
   • Workshop for week 1
   • Check for week 1
2. Week 23 March 2027

   Hiss as a signature

   • Lecture for week 2
   • Workshop for week 2
   • Check for week 2
3. Week 310 March 2027

   What the ear cannot hear

   • Lecture for week 3
   • Workshop for week 3
   • Check for week 3
4. Week 417 March 2027

   The poor image

   • Lecture for week 4
   • Workshop for week 4
   • Check for week 4
5. Week 524 March 2027

   The scriptorium

   • Lecture for week 5
   • Workshop for week 5
   • Check for week 5

   • The Chain due 26 March 2027
6. Week 631 March 2027

   Reading the damage backwards

   • Lecture for week 6
   • Workshop for week 6
   • Check for week 6
7. Week 714 April 2027

   When ancestry becomes hard to read

   • Lecture for week 7
   • Workshop for week 7
   • Check for week 7
8. Week 821 April 2027

   Copying without loss

   • Lecture for week 8
   • Workshop for week 8
   • Check for week 8
9. Week 928 April 2027

   The curse of recursion

   • Lecture for week 9
   • Workshop for week 9
   • Check for week 9

   • The Stemma due 30 April 2027
10. Week 105 May 2027

    Enhance

    • Lecture for week 10
    • Workshop for week 10
    • Check for week 10
11. Week 1112 May 2027

    Chain of custody

    • Lecture for week 11
    • Workshop for week 11
    • Check for week 11
12. Week 1219 May 2027

    The original that never was

    • Lecture for week 12
    • Workshop for week 12
    • Check for week 12

    • The Lossless Argument due 7 June 2027

Every "Check" link above opens that week's own Generation Check question — the same five-minute exercise, with different evidence each week.

Where to go next