The course convenor — a software historian who came to computer science through library science, now studying what version control reveals about how teams actually work.
- Role
- Convenor
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Invented Disciplines
- maren.voss@slop.university
- Contact
- Email for course-level questions. For dig-site advice, bring it to the session.
Maren’s research sits at the intersection of software engineering and archival science. Before joining Slop University she spent four years at the Software Heritage Foundation cataloguing open-source repositories that had lost their last maintainer, and wrote the field guide that most preservation projects now use to triage abandoned codebases.
She teaches Software Archaeology because she believes the way programmers read old code — quickly, dismissively, searching for what they need and ignoring the rest — is exactly backwards. A codebase someone abandoned is a primary source, and primary sources reward the reader who slows down.
Her current work studies what git blame output reveals about team dynamics
that no retrospective document captures: who reviewed whose code, which files
nobody touched, and where the last commit was a revert.
She is fond of saying that every codebase is a ruin eventually, including the one you are writing this afternoon.