Author: Titaÿna Kauffmann
Titaÿna Kauffmann is a PhD candidate at C2DH and member of the D4H board.
Preserving What We Barely Recognize as Heritage
Source code must survive before it can be used as a historical source, yet code has not traditionally been treated as something worth preserving. In practice, it runs, gets overwritten, deleted, lost to hardware failures, or simply neglected. That is why the question of whether code deserves preservation is not purely technical: it is historical and political, as is the question of who bears responsibility for ensuring that preservation.
Reference
Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, with Julie Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984, p. xiii.