Seamus Ross
Seamus Ross is Professor in Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, also known as U of T’s iSchool. He served as Dean for seven years (2009-2015). Before joining Toronto, he was Professor of Humanities Informatics and Digital Curation and Founding Director of HATII (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute) at the University of Glasgow (1997-2009). Before joining Toronto, he was Professor of Humanities Informatics and Digital Curation and Founding Director of HATII (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute) at the University of Glasgow (1997-2009). Dr. Ross served as Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre in the U.K. (2004-2009) and was Principal Director of ERPANET (2001-2004) and DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) (2006-2009). He was a co-principal investigator on such projects as the DELOS Digital Libraries Network of Excellence (2004-2007), Planets (2006-2010), and Digicult Forum (2002-2004). Dr. Ross was Assistant Secretary (Information Technology) at the British Academy in London (1990-1997). He contributes to the work of professional associations and advisory boards such as the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI).Dr. Ross’s scholarly research has focused on digital humanities, digital preservation, digitization, digital repositories[1], emulation, digital archaeology, semantic extraction and genre classification[2], and cultural heritage informatics[3]. See for instance his co-authored studies of “Digital Archaeology”[4] and forensic storage formats[5], his examination of digital preservation and archival science[6], and his introduction to digital preservation,Changing Trains at Wigan[7]. He also promotes broadening access to scholarship and was instrumental in the creation of the Digiman Series by DigitalPreservationEurope (e.g., 2009 video Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster: An Animation[8]). He has been engaged in digital humanities research, publication and pedagogy since the early to mid-1980s.
[1] e.g., http://www.repositoryaudit.eu/
[2] e.g., Kim, Y., and Ross, S. (2011), “Formulating representative features with respect to genre classification”. Text, speech and language technology (42). Springer, pp. 129-147. ISBN 9789048191772 (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-90-481-9178-9_6)
[3] e.g., http://www.digicult.info/pages/techwatch.php
[4] e.g., an early study S Ross and A Gow, 1999, Digital archaeology? Rescuing Neglected or Damaged Data Resources, (British Library and Joint Information Systems Committee), ISBN 1900508516,http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/supporting/pdf/p2.pdf
[5] Kim, Y., and Ross, S. (2012) “Digital forensics formats: seeking a digital preservation storage container format for web archiving.”International Journal of Digital Curation, 7 (2). pp. 21-39. ISSN 1746-8256 (doi:10.2218/ijdc.v7i2.227).
[6] Ross, S. (2011), “Digital Preservation, Archival Science and Methodological Foundations for Digital Libraries”, New Review of Information Networking, 17:1, 43-68. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13614576.2012.679446).
[7] Ross, S. (2000), Changing Trains at Wigan: Digital Preservation and the Future of Scholarship, National Preservation Office (British Library), ISBN 0712347178, http://eprints.erpanet.org/45/
