What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page, a teaching-team
reference, and a deck. Twelve lectures. Twelve decks. No lecture argues a case
without slides to back it. related: connects lectures to the sessions and
assessments they feed.
final_FINAL_revised2
Why humans version so badly even when they are smart, and why the filename, not the file, has been doing the work all along
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
What Is a File?
Identity, metadata, hashes, and what actually makes two files "the same," and why the filesystem, the operating system, and the user each answer that question differently
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Copies & Clones
Duplication vs. derivation, when a copy stops being a copy and becomes its own thing, and why no technical test can tell you the moment it happened
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Save As
What "Save As," repeated, actually is branching performed by people who have never used the word, without a graph, a diff, or a merge tool
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Before Git
Version control as an old problem, not a new tool. Scribal copying, carbon paper, redlined contracts, and what RCS actually automated
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
The Diff
How a machine compares two versions, why the comparison is legible, and why the same algorithm cannot tell you what to do about it
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Merge Conflict
Two true, incompatible histories, and what actually gets decided when a system runs out of authority to decide it
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
The Canonical Version
Authority. Who gets to say which copy is real, and on what grounds, once a hash or a timestamp can no longer settle the question
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
Sync Is a Lie
What a sync service is actually doing when it says two devices are in sync, and what the conflict copy in your folder is a record of
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
Conversion Damage
What a format conversion actually discards, and why a chain of lossy steps ends somewhere no single step would have taken you
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
Provenance & Forensics
Reconstructing a history from fragments, and how archivists formalised that work a century before software did
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
Archive or Delete?
Retention, digital decay, and what it takes to build a system that tells you the truth about which version is current
Week 12 · 10 May 2027