SLOP8374: Software Archaeology

Excavating intent from abandoned code. Students learn to date, read, and diagnose dead software using forensic techniques — git blame as stratigraphy, commit messages as inscriptions, dependency graphs as tool inventories — then confront the ethics of reviving someone else's abandoned work.

• forensics
• history
• code

What you will do

Pick a dead codebase — someone's abandoned project, its last commit gathering dust — and spend a semester working out what it was, how it worked, why it died, and whether it deserves to come back.

You will learn forensic techniques that no other course teaches: readinggit blame the way a geologist reads rock strata, dating a project by its dependency manifest, reconstructing a team's working culture from the messages they left behind. By week 8 you will know your dig site better than its original authors did. By week 12 you will present it to an audience who has never seen it, and your job is to make them care.

Who it is for

Postgraduate students who have already shipped software and inherited somebody else's. The course assumes you can read an unfamiliar codebase in at least one language and work independently for twelve weeks on a single object of study; it assumes no archaeology, no historiography and no prior exposure to conservation theory, all of which are taught here.

It is an 8000-level course because the work is interpretive rather than procedural. There is no correct answer to what killed a project, only a reading you can evidence and defend — and the assessment is weighted accordingly, toward argument rather than output.

How it is taught

Each week pairs a lecture with a seminar. The lecture supplies the method and its literature — the course borrows openly from archaeological stratigraphy, from conservation ethics, and from oral-history practice, because each has spent a century on problems software has spent twenty years rediscovering. The seminar is where you apply that week's method to your own dig site and defend the result to the room.

Where to go next