Week 7: Finding the people

Oral history methodology for software — finding former maintainers, the ethics of contact, and what living sources reveal that artefacts cannot.

5 April 2027

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Learning outcomes#

By the end of this week you should be able to:

1. design an oral-history enquiry appropriate to a software project
2. apply a research-ethics framework to contact with former maintainers, including deciding against contact
3. triangulate testimony against the documentary record, and account for divergence

Outline#

• The contributor graph as a cast list: git shortlog, GitHub profiles, the trail of digital presence
• Oral history in other fields: how historians, anthropologists, and journalists approach living sources
• Research ethics for software: informed consent, voluntary participation, the right to not have your abandoned project studied
• Case study: the maintainers nobody knew — Nadia Eghbal’s Roads and Bridges and the invisible labour of open-source maintenance
• What former maintainers know that artefacts do not: the argument that led to the rewrite, the sponsor who pulled out, the burnout nobody talked about
• When contact is not possible: secondary sources and their limits

Required reading#

• Portelli, A. (1981) ‘The Peculiarities of Oral History’, History Workshop Journal 12(1), pp. 96–107.
• Eghbal, N. (2016) Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure. Ford Foundation.

Further reading#

• Ritchie, D.A. (2014) Doing Oral History, 3rd edn. Oxford University Press. Chapters 3–4.
• Star, S.L. (1999) ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist 43(3), pp. 377–391.

Seminar questions#

1. Portelli argues that what a source gets wrong is itself evidence. How would you use a maintainer’s inaccurate recollection without discrediting them?
2. Eghbal documents labour that leaves almost no trace in the artefacts. What methods could recover it, and what are their limits?
3. Your dig site was archived with a note asking to be left alone. Construct the strongest argument for contacting the author anyway — then rebut it.