The Antikythera Mechanism
Information archaeology describes a study of historical information systems through analysis of the visible culture that defined them.
Whereas artefacts studied by archaeologists are physical objects such as tools, clothing and decorations, information archaeology focuses on diagrams, specifications and the archetypes of information they contain.
Inputs and outputs
Inputs and outputs form the conceptual basis of both hardware and software specifications.
Specifications for computing devices like Von Neumann architecture represented inputs and outputs as a function of hardware. By contrast, machine learning and data mining software use input data and possible outputs as the basis of decision tree learning models.
Structure and flow
Structure and flow resolves correspondences between data flow and system design.
Structured software programs are composed of hierarchical flow structures that follow patterns of sequence, selection and repetition. A program's inputs and outputs are captured in the structure of the program itself.
Models and behaviours
Structured programming gave rise to the modelling and behavioural design of systems.
Business process models represented enterprise behaviours for analysis and improvement. Increasing dependency on GUIs led to object oriented software becoming the dominant programming methodology with its own graphic notation for creating visual models of software systems.
Boundary analysis
Representations of information archetypes are boundary objects - artefacts that reside in the interfaces between organisations, individuals and the systems produced. This is why using information archaeology as a lens, is an effective way to make sense of present complexity by focussed analysis of the past.
The historical background…
My interest in this idea began with a lightning talk I presented at EuroIA 2013 in Edinburgh.
The idea was developed a little further at another conference in 2014, The First International Conference on Software Archaelogy. I know I have the slides somewhere but I’ll have to go and dig them out.