About

The Hooke Park material passport records what is known about a piece of timber and hands it on. The records made for this dissertation are the first part of it to go online; project pages, a story layer and a handover area for the next cohort are laid out to follow.

What a record holds

Four groups of fields: identity and source, condition, processing, and annotation. Every entry carries its own source, because there is no third party here to vouch for one: the recorder is the person doing the work. Every blank carries its kind of gap and the person who would have to supply it, because a blank means different things and the next person has to act differently on each.

A table that looks full is a lie. The blanks on these pages are not errors and are not styled as errors.

How coarse a record is, and why

The level a record is held at is set by the production regime the material is entering or has been through. The banner at the top of every page states the level and says which of two cases it is: the material is still unworked, so a finer level can be measured again and entered under a new date, or it has been worked and the finer level is closed, leaving only the last point at which it was known.

Where the data actually lives

Underneath these pages are structured folders, one to a record, holding scans, photographs and raw measurements under metadata stating what, when, at what resolution, and which decisions that resolution supports. Those folders sit on local and cloud storage and are the thing that is kept. The pages are an interface over them.

Why the interface is not the data

The Woodchip Barn's own online construction log went when the site it lived on was rebuilt; what is left of it is in a web capture. This site will be rebuilt too, on someone else's schedule, and whoever is holding it then will not be the person who made it. That is the reason the folders and their metadata are the deliverable and this interface is not.