The Source Code Exhibition, launched at UNESCO headquarters in Paris during Software Heritage’s 10th anniversary symposium in January 2026, has since travelled to several venues in France, including the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie, Sorbonne University’s MIR library and Télécom Paris, and abroad to the Computer History Museum in Ljubljana, Slovenia. On 13 October, it arrived at the Belval Campus of the University of Luxembourg, home to one of its curators, before continuing to SFSCON in Bolzano, Italy, in November.

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Source code is usually thought of as instructions for machines, but it is also a text written by people, for people: it is read, taught and imitated within communities, and it bears the marks of the context in which it was written. The Source Code Exhibition (sourcecode-exhibition.softwareheritage.org) originally presented at UNESCO (Paris) during Software Heritage’s 10th anniversary, has now arrived to The University of Luxembourg, where it will be on display from October 13th-29th at the ground floor of Maison Du Savoir (see the C²DH event page for details).

It invites visitors to approach source code as they would any other historical document: asking who wrote it, when, for what purpose and under which constraints, and paying attention both to what it reveals (through its names, comments and structure) and to what it leaves out. Read this way, source code appears at once as a cultural artefact, a mirror of the societies and power relations that produce it, and a historical testimony worth preserving.

The exhibition is organized around three main themes: 1) Source Code as Cultural Artifact, 2) Source Code as Mirror of Society, and 3) Source Code as Historical Testimony. The curators of the exhibition selected a total of fifteen contributions among many proposals submitted by academic scholars, software engineers, and art practitioners in an Open Call, hoping to illustrate the many dimensions through which source code can be understood and appreciated.

On October 13th, the exhibition was launched at 14.00 at Maison du Savoir. From 16.00–18.30, Valérie Schafer (C²DH) moderated a roundtable with the curators of the exhibition, Mathilde Fichen, Titaÿna Kauffmann Will, Stefano Penge and Camille Picard. They were joined by two of the exhibition’s contributors, Stéphane Bortzmeyer and Kate Mancey. The audience (formed by many scholars from different disciplines, notably from C2DH, LIST, or LISER, amongst others) was lucky enough to enjoy a very interesting academic conversation where curators explained their favorite exhibition pieces, as well as the artistic and intellectual process behind the curation of the exhibition.

In sum: the Source Code exhibition is an event not to be missed, and we cordially invite you to stop by at Maison du Savoir here in Belval.