The Dig Report
Survey your dig site — its stratigraphy, its tool inventory, its architecture, and your first hypothesis for how it died.
Due: 22 March 2027 · Weight: 25%
The brief#
By week 5 you have surveyed your dig site, read its stratigraphy, analysed its inscriptions, and inventoried its tools. The Dig Report brings those four investigations together into a single document.
Your report should include:
- The site: what the project was, its language, its approximate size, its date range of activity
- Stratigraphy: your commit-frequency timeline, with the phases and boundary events you identified in week 2
- Inscriptions: your commit-message analysis from week 3, including the single most diagnostic message
- Tool inventory: your dependency analysis from week 4, including any abandoned dependencies
- Hypothesis: your first cause-of-death diagnosis, supported by evidence from at least two of the above
1500 words, plus the timeline visualisation (which does not count toward the word limit).
What you submit#
A PDF or Markdown document. The timeline visualisation may be an image or a text-based chart — whatever communicates the pattern most clearly.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- covers all four methods taught in weeks 1-4 (survey, dating, inscriptions, tools)
- includes a commit-frequency timeline visualisation
- cause-of-death hypothesis is stated and supported by at least two pieces of evidence
- all evidence cites specific commits, files, or dependency versions
- 1500 words, plus the timeline visualisation
How it is marked
| Criterion | Weight |
|---|---|
| Depth of forensic reading | 40% |
| Quality of argument | 35% |
| Clarity of presentation | 25% |