Forensics (Digital)

In this paper we present ongoing work conducted as part of the BitCurator project to develop reusable, extensible strategies for transforming and incorporating metadata produced by digital forensics tools into archival metadata schemas. We focus on the metadata produced by open-source tools that support Digital Forensics XML (DFXML), and we describe how portions of this metadata can be used when recording PREMIS events to describe activities relevant to preservation and access.

A truthful chaotic path of the discovery involving the understanding of mysterious digital media reflects my own experiences on similar digital preservation adventures.
http://notepad.benfinoradin.info/2013/09/12/it-takes-a-village-to-save-a...

from Digital Curation Exchange - Before you begin extracting information from physical media, it will be helpful to assess your current situation. Take a look at what physical media you already have and what media you are considering to add to your holdings. Make sure you understand the processes of acquiring information from physical media – including the human resources, technology, and costs. It is also be a good idea to understand how information is saved and accessed in computer systems.

In 2012, Porter Olsen of the University of Maryland wrote a post for the MITH blog describing how to build a digital curation workstation using readily available hardware (at least for the present) and the BitCurator suite of digital forensics tools. Matt Kirschenbaum and I revisited that topic a few weeks ago for a poster we presented at the Digital Humanities 2013 conference. We got a number of requests asking for the digital version of the poster, so I’ve revised it slightly and uploaded the poser in blog form.

While the purview of digital forensics was once specialized to fields of law enforcement, computer security, and national defense, the increasing ubiquity of computers and electronic devices means that digital forensics is now used in a wide variety of cases and circumstances. Most records today are born digital, and libraries and other collecting institutions increasingly receive computer storage media as part of their acquisition of "papers" from writers, scholars, scientists, musicians, and public figures.

from The Signal - An interview with Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, who is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. Much of his work now focuses on the critical and scholarly implications of the shift to born-digital textual and cultural production. He is the author of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press 2008).

In the increasingly dynamic environment of mobile forensics, this paper provides an overview of the capabilities of three popular mobile forensic tools on three mobile phones based on Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and RIM’s BlackBerry operating systems.

Porter Olsen discussed the BitCurator Project, a system for cultural heritage professionals that incorporates the functionality of many digital forensics tools. In this presentation, he demonstrated a beta version of the BitCurator Environment and specifically showed how the digital forensics tools included in BitCurator address the needs of digital archivists.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAYlpZPMn_I&feature=player_embedded

his paper presents the findings of semi-structured interviews with archivists and curators applying digital forensics tools and practices to the management of born-digital content. The interviews were designed to explore which digital forensic tools are in use, how they are implemented within a digital forensics workflow, and what further challenges and opportunities such use may present.

Gengenbach, Martin J. “The Way We Do it Here”: Mapping Digital Forensics Workflows in Collecting Institutions - This paper presents the findings of semi-structured interviews with archivists and curators applying digital forensics tools and practices to the management of born-digital content. The interviews were designed to explore which digital forensic tools are in use, how they are implemented within a digital forensics workflow, and what further challenges and opportunities such use may present.