Week-long Digital Forensics & BitCurator Training Aug 4-8

[pwolsen]

Hi all,

Kam Woods and I will be teaching a week-long intensive learning course on Digital Forensics for the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching institute (HILT) here at the University of Maryland from August 4th through the 8th. A full description of the course can be found below, but in brief this will be a week dedicated to using digital forensics tools and practices to preserve and analyze born-digital materials. We will cover the field of digital forensics broadly, but also spend significant time working in the BitCurator environment and the wide variety of digital forensics tools it contains. This will be a hands-on course with a mix of lecture, discussion, and workshops, with opportunities to work collaboratively with the class to design custom digital preservation workflows that specifically address the needs of your institution. Visit the HILT main page to learn more and to register, and feel free to email me if you have any questions about the course.

Best,
Porter

HILT Born-Digital Forensics Course Description

This course will introduce students to the role of digital forensics in the act of preserving, investigating, and curating born-digital culture artifacts. We will explore the technical underpinning and the physical materiality of the digital objects we frequently, in our screen-centric world, mistake as ephemeral. Using open source tools including Linux, The Sleuth Kit, and BitCurator, students will get hands-on training exploring a wide variety of digital media and learning how to look for deleted files, how to search and redact personally identifiable information, and how to produce information-rich metadata about a forensic disk image. In addition to practical skills, students will develop a theoretical understanding of digital storage media–and the forensics disk images produced from them–as objects of study in their own right and the importance of learning to read these objects as richly as we do more traditional texts. There are no essential prerequisite skills for this course; however, a working knowledge of Linux will be a great benefit. Students who have access to their own collection of born-digital materials to work with are encouraged to bring them to the course.