Week 12: The exhibit

Presenting your excavation — how to make an audience care about a codebase they have never seen and will never use.

10 May 2027

Open the slides

Learning outcomes#

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

1. structure a technical excavation as a sustained argument for a non-specialist audience
2. select evidence for interpretive weight rather than completeness
3. defend methodological and ethical choices under questioning

Outline#

• The museum exhibit as a model for technical communication: narrative, artefacts, interpretation, invitation
• Structure: the site, the excavation, the diagnosis, the ethics, the restoration — in that order, because the audience needs to care about the project before they can care about your analysis
• What makes a good exhibit: specificity beats comprehensiveness. One well-told story is worth more than twelve findings listed.
• The written companion: 2000 words that complement the presentation rather than transcribing it
• Final reflections: what your dig site taught you about how software lives and dies, and what you will read differently in your own code from now on

Required reading#

• Tilden, F. (1977 [1957]) Interpreting Our Heritage, 3rd edn. University of North Carolina Press. Chapters 1–3.
• Serrell, B. (2015) Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach, 2nd edn. Rowman & Littlefield. Chapters 1–2.

Further reading#

• Kirschenbaum, M.G. (2008) Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. MIT Press.
• Eghbal, N. (2020) Working in Public. Stripe Press. Concluding chapter.

Seminar questions#

1. Tilden’s first principle is that interpretation must relate to something within the visitor’s experience. What in your audience’s experience does an abandoned codebase relate to?
2. Serrell argues the commonest exhibit failure is telling everything. Which three findings would you cut first, and what does cutting them cost?
3. Your dig site’s authors could be in the room. Does that change what you say, and should it?