Work / personal and exploratory
The Digital Archaeologist
Recovers and organises project history, separating source material from later interpretation and keeping work transferable between people and agents.
How the work ran
Recovery work that never touches its own source.
01
Zero to a working local app in one day
Founded 23 August 2026: a foundation, a catalogue pipeline and a Windows tray controller, built and committed one after another the same day.
02
A context pack that keeps private evidence separate from what's reviewable
A Git commit hook, built 25 August, automatically publishes a reviewed, checksum-verified copy of the project's own documentation — designed in from week one.
03
Completing the recovery pipeline
The core recovery pipeline matured through September: old email archive formats, old websites and other neglected personal archives, never edited or moved, only catalogued.
04
From a CLI tool to a proper local desktop app
A Windows tray controller and a full local "Evidence Workbench" interface replaced the command-line-only tool on 14 September; still under active daily development.
01 / Zero to a working local app in one day
The Digital Archaeologist started on 23 August 2026, and within a single day had a working local application: a foundation, a catalogue pipeline, and a Windows tray controller to run it, built and committed one after another.
The idea was straightforward, but the discipline behind it was not: recover material from old, neglected personal and professional archives, without ever changing, moving or deleting the source.
02 / A context pack that keeps private evidence separate from what’s reviewable
Two days later, a Git commit hook was built that automatically publishes a reviewed, checksum-verified copy of the project’s own documentation to a shared location, every time a commit is made.
That distinction – between the private evidence the tool works with and a separate, reviewable projection of the project itself – was designed in from the first week, not added later once it became necessary.
03 / Completing the recovery pipeline
The following days completed the core recovery pipeline. Through September, its ability to recover material from old email archive formats, old websites and other neglected personal and professional archives matured considerably.
The tool never edits or interprets what it finds. It separates the source material it recovers from any later interpretation of it, and keeps a record of exactly where each piece came from.
04 / From a CLI tool to a proper local desktop app
On 14 September, the project moved from a command-line-only tool to a proper local application: a Windows tray controller alongside a full local “Evidence Workbench” interface, running entirely on the machine it is installed on.
It remains under active, near-daily development. As of today, work is still in progress.
05 / What I did
I designed and built this alone: the provenance-first architecture, the discipline of keeping recovered material separate from interpretation, and the shift from a command-line tool to a proper local application.
06 / What this project demonstrates
The Digital Archaeologist is a local, provenance-first tool. It runs entirely on one machine, never as a cloud service, and it never modifies, moves or deletes the material it catalogues.
It also has a real relationship to the Interactive Professional Portfolio: material it recovers can be explicitly authorised into the research side of that project’s evidence corpus, kept separate from what is actually live and published. Moving anything from research into the live, published record is always a separate, deliberate decision – never automatic.