What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page and a teaching-team
reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a
real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they
feed.
What makes software dead?
The opening lecture — what software archaeology is, why abandoned code matters, and how to choose a dig site.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Dating techniques
How to read a commit history as geological layers — construction, maintenance, decay — and what the boundaries between them reveal.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Reading the inscriptions
Commit messages as primary sources — what they reveal about team culture, communication norms, and working conditions.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
The tool kit
Dependency manifests as archaeological artefacts — what a project's chosen tools reveal about its era, its team, and its assumptions.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Reconstructing architecture
Reading a project's structure as a site plan — what directory layout, naming conventions, and entry points reveal about how the team thought.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
What the docs do not say
Documentation as archaeological evidence — what was written, what was maintained, and what the gap between them reveals.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Finding the people
Oral history methodology for software — finding former maintainers, the ethics of contact, and what living sources reveal that artefacts cannot.
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
Cause of death
A taxonomy of software failure — why projects die, how to tell the modes apart, and why the diagnosis matters.
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
Archives and time capsules
Software preservation — the institutions that try, the difference between archiving code and preserving the ability to run it, and what still gets lost.
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
The ethics of digging
Whose code is it — licence vs intent, forking as continuation vs appropriation, and the question no licence file answers.
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
Minimum intervention
Restoration practice — reviving one piece of dead software with the smallest possible change, the way a conservator stabilises a painting.
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
The exhibit
Presenting your excavation — how to make an audience care about a codebase they have never seen and will never use.
Week 12 · 10 May 2027