Digs

Twelve weeks, twelve forensic methods, one dig site — grouped into the four phases the semester moves through.

Every week is a method, not a topic. You bring the same dig site to all twelve, and each one gives you a different way to read it — so the findings accumulate rather than reset. Weeks 1–4 establish what the thing is; 5–8 work out why it died; 9–11 ask whether it should come back; week 12 is where you tell someone.

Each dig page carries three things: what to do before you arrive, what happens in the room, and what leaves with you.

Survey

What is this thing?

Weeks 1–4

  1. Week 1:The dead repo

    Survey — what makes software dead, how to tell, and how to choose a dig site you will spend the semester excavating.

    22 February 2027

  2. Week 2:Stratigraphy

    Dating techniques — reading the commit history as geological layers to identify periods of construction, maintenance, and abandonment.

    1 March 2027

  3. Week 3:The inscriptions

    Reading the inscriptions — commit messages as primary sources for a team's communication norms, morale, and working patterns.

    8 March 2027

  4. Week 4:Tool inventory

    Dependency analysis — reading package manifests as archaeological tool kits to date the project and reconstruct the technological era it belongs to.

    15 March 2027

Analysis

Why did it die?

Weeks 5–8

  1. Week 5:Architecture from ruins

    Spatial analysis — reconstructing the mental model the original authors had from directory structure, entry points, and file naming conventions alone.

    22 March 2027

  2. Week 6:The documentation layer

    Epigraphy — reading the writing the authors left behind, and diagnosing the project from the gap between what the docs promise and what the code does.

    29 March 2027

  3. Week 7:Oral history

    Interview technique — how to find former maintainers, how to approach them, and what you learn that no artefact can tell you.

    5 April 2027

  4. Week 8:Cause of death

    Forensic diagnosis — why projects die, a taxonomy of failure modes, and how to distinguish burnout from ecosystem shift from silent success.

    12 April 2027

Ethics and restoration

Should it come back?

Weeks 9–11

  1. Week 9:Preservation

    Conservation — the difference between preserving code and preserving the ability to run it, and the institutions that try to do both.

    19 April 2027

  2. Week 10:Restoration ethics

    Whose code is it — the ethics of forking abandoned work, the difference between licence and intent, and when revival is continuation vs appropriation.

    26 April 2027

  3. Week 11:The restoration

    Minimum intervention — reviving one piece of your dig site the way a conservator restores a painting: stabilise, do not repaint.

    3 May 2027

Exhibit

Tell the story.

Week 12

  1. Week 12:The exhibit

    Presentation — your complete excavation presented as a museum exhibit, for an audience who has never seen the codebase.

    10 May 2027