I actually saw this on my trip to London last month. Definitely one of the more interesting exhibits there, part art, part historical exhibit, part philanthropy. Definitely worth a visit in person.
It is fascinating to see how much can be reconstructed and heart warming what patience is shown by those who reassemble these precious parts of history.
But perhaps we (humans) should in general try not to destroy so many things in the first place. Be it historic pieces, general infrastructure (check the tragedy taking place in Ukraine), endangered species, the environment.
The militants had been combing embassy records and figuring out who was CIA. They had even hired teams of carpet weavers to successfully reassemble shredded documents. (The recovered papers would later be published by the Iranian government in a series of books called Documents From the US Espionage Den.)
In 2007 research began on developing a computer-aided reconstruction program in a pilot project. Since the launch of the test phase at the end of 2013, approximately 60,000 pages from 18 bags have been reconstructed so far (status August 2020).
So I guess it did work, some kind of software was implemented, and results are being produced.
I wonder why they went through the trouble to shred enough paper to fill 16,000 bags, only to then archive the bags? So strange but I'm not a history buff so I don't know the details. Feels like it would have been way more efficient in terms of destroying the records if the bags had been thrown in a river/lake (or, obviously, burnt). Perhaps there was no time, although all that shredding and bagging must have taken a while. Almost makes we wish I spent more time on this when I visited Berlin. :)
I remember once someone mentioned in comments here a science fiction book where a whole library was digitised by pumping all the books into a massive shredder, blowing the shreds through a pipe with cameras all over the walls, then stitching it electronically. Can't remember what the book was...
So much to glean from society this way. Maybe museums around the world should work out arrangements to acquire every 1,000th bin going to a midden in some relatively exotic locale.
