Documentation Question

[Andrew Trevors]

Sorry to post a non-development question here but I figured that this mailing 
list would have the answers I need.  I am a graduate
student at a university in Ontario, Canada.  I am taking part in the teaching 
of a course on Software Architecture.  We will be
using GNU Emacs as a guinea pig this coming semester (we've used Linux, Vim, 
Apache, Mozilla, Nautilus, PostgreSQL, mySQL, and a
wealth of other open source software).  The idea is to study the architecture 
(high level components, e.g. subsystems, and their
interactions) of a real system by first formulating a conceptual architecture 
(the as-designed view as the developers see it) and
then extracting a concrete architecture (the as-implemented view) and then 
comparing them, and suggesting ways to repair the
architecture (the two should be the same, but they are often not).

Now, why I've posted this here is that I haven't had much luck finding any 
design type documentation that could be used to formulate
a conceptual architecture.  Is there any sort of docs or anything that is used 
to teach new programmers to the project, or is this
type of thing usually up to the programmer himself by reading through 
code/comments.

Thanks for any help you can give me.  If I have offended or annoyed anybody by 
posting here, I apoligize and I'm sorry.

Andrew

Andrew Trevors BCS (UNB) MMath I
Graduate Student, Software Architecture Group
School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo