Syllabus
SLOP1976 · Semester 1 2027 · 22 February 2027 to 28 May 2027
Version 2.2 · Supersedes v2.1 · Status: CURRENT
- v2.1: Spelling normalised to "formalised" for consistency with the rest of the site.
- v2.0: Punctuation brought into line with the site's current style.
- v1.0: Thirteen weeks. Week 11 was two separate weeks (Forensic Versioning, then Provenance & Archives) before they were merged: the same work looked at from two directions, not two topics.
Versioning, Copies, and Digital Truth
Digital work is rarely one file. It is a family of near-duplicates competing to become the truth.
The course is not about filenames. It is about how humans and systems decide which version counts, and what is lost in the deciding. The same seven questions keep coming back, in different clothes, for twelve weeks:
- When are two files “the same”?
- When does a copy become a new work?
- Who gets to decide which version is authoritative?
- What gets lost when software merges, syncs, compresses, converts, or overwrites?
- Why do humans create duplicate files instead of maintaining one canonical source, even when they know better?
- What happens when different people remember different versions as “the real one”?
- Can provenance be designed, or only reconstructed after the fact?
Schedule
Each week is a lecture and a lab, not one page split in two: the lecture states the week's question, the lab makes it concrete, and each links to the other. Every title below links to that week's lecture. In weeks 6 and 7 the lab is an exercise you do on the page rather than a task you bring to it.
| Week | Title | Core question |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | final_FINAL_revised2 | Why do humans version so badly, even when they're smart? |
| 2 | What Is a File? | Identity, metadata, hashes: what actually makes two files “the same”? |
| 3 | Copies & Clones | Duplication vs. derivation: when does a copy become a new work? |
| 4 | Save As | Branching, performed by people who've never used the word “branch.” |
| 5 | Before Git | Scribal copying, RCS, carbon paper, Track Changes: version control as an old problem, not a new tool. |
| 6 | The Diff | How machines compare versions; why diffs are legible and merges aren't. |
| 7 | Merge Conflict | Two true, incompatible histories: what actually gets decided when they collide. |
| 8 | The Canonical Version | Authority: who gets to say which copy is real, and on what grounds. |
| 9 | Sync Is a Lie | Dropbox, Drive, iCloud, conflict copies: distributed systems for civilians. |
| 10 | Conversion Damage | DOCX → PDF → OCR → TXT: at what point did it stop being the same file? |
| 11 | Provenance & Forensics | Reconstructing a history from fragments, and how archivists formalised that work a century before software did. |
| 12 | Archive or Delete? | Retention, digital decay, and designing a system that doesn't lie to you. |
Assessment
Four pieces of graded work turn each stretch of the argument into evidence: a duplicate audit, a reconstructed timeline, a written merge, a format autopsy. Weights, due weeks and full briefs are on the Assessment page.
After week 12
The Version History closes the course. It is ungraded and nothing is submitted to it. The four assessments produced real evidence over the semester, and that page is where it gets read back against the claim above.