Lou Burnard

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Lou Burnard
Louis Deryck Burnard
Born (1946-12-09) 9 December 1946 (age 76)
Birmingham, England
NationalityBritish
Known for Oxford Text Archive, Text Encoding Initiative
PartnerLilette
Children3
Academic background
Alma mater Balliol College, Oxford

Lou Burnard (born 1946 in Birmingham, England) is an internationally recognised expert [1] in digital humanities, particularly in the area of text encoding and digital libraries. He was assistant director of Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) from 2001 to September 2010, when he officially retired from OUCS. Before that, he was manager of the Humanities Computing Unit at OUCS for five years. He has worked in ICT support for research in the humanities since the 1990s. He was one of the founding editors of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and continues to play an active part in its maintenance and development, as a consultant to the TEI Technical Council and as an elected TEI board member. He has played a key role in the establishment of many other activities and initiatives in this area, such as the UK Arts and Humanities Data Service and the British National Corpus, and has published [2] and lectured widely. Since 2008 he has worked as a Member of the Conseil Scientifique for the CNRS-funded "Adonis" TGE. [3] [4]

Contents

Education and career

He won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford University, graduated with a first in English in 1968, and gained an MPhil in 19th-century English Studies (1973), MA (1979). He taught English at the University of Malawi between 1972 and 1974. [5] [6]

His first job at the University Computing Services was as a data centre operator. He described it as sitting in a large room in the Department of Atmospheric Physics with a line printer, a card reader, a card punch and three teletype devices. The one he sat in front of told the time every five minutes and the date every half hour. If it stopped doing either, he had instructions to call an engineer. Aside from light duties tearing up output from the line printer, that was essentially all he had to do for his 8-hour shift. He learned to program in Algol68, created a concordance to the songs of Bob Dylan, and finally got a job as a programmer in 1974.

He claimed that the first real program he wrote was 12 lines of assembler to link a PDP-8-driven graphics display to an ICL 1900 mainframe. He learned Snobol4, and worked with Susan Hockey on the design of the Oxford Concordance Program (OCP). He also worked on network database management systems, notably Cullinane's IDMS, and on ICL's CAFS text search engine. [7]

In 1976 he set up the Oxford Text Archive with Susan Hockey.

After flirting briefly with applications of computers in History under the tutelage of Manfred Thaller, he succumbed to the lure of SGML in 1988 following the Poughkeepsie Conference, which launched the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) project of which he has been European editor since February 1989.

The Oxford electronic Shakespeare (1989), published by the Oxford University Press, was the first to offer a commercial e-text encoded for analysis. William Montgomery, one of the associate editors, and Lou Burnard encoded each poem or play with COCOA tags so that it could be processed by Micro-Oxford Concordance Program. [8]

Since October 1990 he has also been responsible for OUCS participation in the British National Corpus Project [9] a 100- million-word corpus of modern British English. [6]

He initiated the Xaira (XML Aware Indexing and Retrieval Architecture) project, an advanced text-searching software system for XML resources. Originally developed for searching the British National Corpus, it was funded by the Mellon Foundation in 2005–6. [10]

Publications

Books

Papers

[11] [ unreliable source? ]

Related Research Articles

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References

  1. ↑ "SCOTS - Board Members". www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 22 February 2019. Retrieved 22 February 2019.
  2. ↑ "dblp: Lou Burnard". dblp.uni-trier.de. Archived from the original on 22 February 2019. Retrieved 22 February 2019.
  3. ↑ "Lou Burnard: his home page". users.ox.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 15 January 2019. Retrieved 22 February 2019.
  4. ↑ "Lou Burnard - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com.
  5. ↑ "Mostly true autobiography". users.ox.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 15 April 2017. Retrieved 22 February 2019.
  6. 1 2 "Lou Burnard His Home Page". users.ox.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 11 September 2017. Retrieved 22 February 2019.
  7. ↑ "CAFS: A New Solution to an Old Problem | Digital Scholarship in the Humanities | Oxford Academic". Academic.oup.com. 1 January 1987. Archived from the original on 22 February 2019. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  8. ↑ "Microsoft Word - SQA Advisory Forum pack.doc" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 March 2017. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  9. ↑ Burnard, Lou (September 1997). "The BNC Handbook Exploring the British National Corpus with SARA" (PDF). corpus.leeds.ac.uk. Archived (PDF) from the original on 13 July 2018. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  10. ↑ "Digital Resources for the Humanities 2004 :: Speakers". 30 October 2004. Archived from the original on 30 October 2004.
  11. ↑ "Bibliography". users.ox.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 27 April 2012. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  12. ↑ "What is SGML (Burnard)". xml.coverpages.org. Archived from the original on 28 July 2018. Retrieved 22 February 2019.
  13. ↑ http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/messages/downloadsexceeded.html. Archived from the original on 24 April 2019. Retrieved 28 April 2019.{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  14. ↑ Burnard, Lou; Bauman, Syd, eds. (2007), TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (PDF), Charlottesville, Virginia, USA: TEI Consortium, archived (PDF) from the original on 15 January 2019, retrieved 26 February 2019
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