Week 12 Workshop: The original that never was

What should this archive preserve, given a limited budget?

19 May 2027

What should this archive preserve, given a limited budget?

Learning target. Defend a preservation choice while acknowledging a worthwhile alternative.

Before the workshop#

Download the week 12 pack: budget.txt states the annual budget, the per-tier rates, and each of the three archive families’ real item counts and sizes. proposals.csv gives two competing allocations. Do not open reveal/ yet.

Readings.

1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), §II–III, freely available at marxists.org. Read for the claim that even a perfect reproduction lacks the original’s “presence in time and space” — its “aura.” This week’s title takes its name from that idea: a preservation choice that keeps a source file has not thereby kept everything week 4 through 11 found interesting about the object it came from.
2. Caleb Stephens, “How Pixar Saved Toy Story 2” (PremiumBeat, 2018), freely available at premiumbeat.com/blog/how-pixar-saved-toy-story-2. A documented case: a routine deletion command destroyed 90% of the film’s assets, the tape backups that were assumed to work turned out to be silently broken, and the film was recovered only because one employee happened to keep her own copy. Read for what made the backup failure invisible until it was tested by an actual restore.

Check — 5 minutes#

reveal/analysis.md is not open yet, but proposal-totals.csv is: both supplied proposals fit within budget. Read their two summaries in budget.txt’s pairing with proposals.csv. Which would you choose, and what loss are you accepting by not choosing the other? State your answer and the accepted loss in one sentence each.

Receive — 15 minutes#

Confirm you can state, in your own words, why a preservation budget forces a choice even when every individual family’s storage bytes are cheap: for this archive, the dominant cost is not gigabytes, it is the labor of curating, auditing and writing an accessible description for each item — a cost that scales with item count, not file size.

Investigate — 40 minutes#

Allocate the stated budget across at least two families (15 minutes). Using proposals.csv, verify both supplied proposals’ costs by recomputing one family’s line yourself from the rates in budget.txt. Then decide which you would defend, or sketch a third allocation of your own within the same budget.

Test your choice after a changed cost assumption (15 minutes). Open sensitivity.csv. One rate has changed: source-tier labor rose from $12 to $20 per item, reflecting that full preservation now includes a week-11-style provenance audit per item. Check whether your chosen proposal is still affordable under the revised rate, and if it is not, say what you would cut.

Respond to a serious alternative proposal (10 minutes). Open objection.txt. Before reading the supplied response, write your own answer to the objection. Then compare.

Evaluate — 30 minutes#

Write the preservation memo you are depositing: your chosen allocation, its cost under both the baseline and revised rates, the accepted loss stated precisely, and your response to the objection. Then answer: is there a version of “total preservation value” you could compute that would make this choice obvious rather than genuinely contested? If you propose one, say what consideration it leaves out.

Deposit — 30 minutes#

Open reveal/analysis.md (ask your tutor for the link once your memo is written) and compare it against your memo. It does not name a winning proposal, and neither should yours — a memo that states its allocation, its cost under both rates, and the loss it accepts is complete without also insisting no other choice was defensible. Deposit your memo across the print, audio and image collections, one line per family stating what this budget would and would not preserve there.

Accessible route#

budget.txt, proposals.csv, proposal-totals.csv and sensitivity.csv are all plain text and require no debate or spoken participation; the written memo is the deliverable either way.

Assessment#

Generation Checks’s final five-minute check runs today. The Lossless Argument is due 2027-06-07, 12:00 Canberra time — this week’s budgeted memo is worked practice for exactly that assessment’s scope, costing and alternatives criteria, at a smaller scale.