case study — 01 / 02
poster boy: becoming zyzz
digital archaeology for a story born online
watch on Stan ↗Correlo made a small, specialist contribution to Revealed: Poster Boy - Becoming Zyzz, rebuilding fragments of early-2000s internet forums into a searchable research environment. The work gave the documentary team a faster way to trace posts and conversations across surviving archived material.
approach
Archived forums rarely survive as complete websites. Pages are scattered across capture dates, links break and native search is gone. We gathered the available shards, normalised thread and post structures, restored navigation and indexed the recovered material. The aim was not a perfect replica, but a useful facsimile that preserved enough context for researchers to follow usernames, quotes and exchanges.
outcome
The resulting tool turned a fragmented archive into something the production team could actually browse and search. It helped producers and directors locate conversations connected to people in the film and bring first-person traces of the early social web into their research. It was a focused piece of work within a much larger production: small in scope, but well matched to the story's digital origins.