Seamus Ross

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Seamus Ross (born November 12, 1957) is a digital humanities and digital curation academic and researcher based in Canada.

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He is the son of James Francis Ross, a philosopher, and Kathleen Fallon Ross, a nurse. After graduating from the William Penn Charter School, he earned his A.B. (1979) from Vassar College (United States), his M.A. (1982) from the University of Pennsylvania (USA), and his D.Phil. (1992) from the University of Oxford (UK). [1]

Seamus Ross is Professor at the iSchool at the University of Toronto, also known as the Faculty of Information and from 2009 through 2015 he served as the School's Dean. During 2016, he is Visiting Professor at the School of Information Sciences and Technology, Athens University of Economics and Business (Athens, GR), and Interim Director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Before joining Toronto, he was Professor of Humanities Informatics and Digital Curation and Founding Director of HATII (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute) [2] (1997–2009) at the University of Glasgow. He was one of the founders of and served as Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre (2004–9) in the UK, [3] and was Principal Director of ERPANET [4] and Digital Preservation Europe (DPE) and a co-principal investigator such projects as the DELOS Digital Libraries Network of Excellence, [5] Planets [6] and the Digicult Forum. [7] From the beginning of 1990 through 1996, Ross was Assistant Secretary (Information Technology) at the British Academy in London.

Ross's scholarly research has focused on digital humanities, digital preservation, digital curation, digitisation, digital repositories, emulation, digital archaeology, semantic extraction and genre classification, and cultural heritage informatics. See for instance his study of digital archaeology, [8] his examination of digital preservation and archival science, [9] and his introduction to digital preservation, Changing Trains at Wigan. [10] He promotes a diversity in ways of making scholarship available to broader audiences and was instrumental in the creation of the Digiman Series through Digital Preservation Europe, Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster: An Animation, [11]

Honours

In March 2016, Ross was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters. [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Curator</span> Content specialist charged with managing an institutions collections

A curator is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the particular institution and its mission. In recent years the role of curator has evolved alongside the changing role of museums, and the term "curator" may designate the head of any given division. More recently, new kinds of curators have started to emerge: "community curators", "literary curators", "digital curators" and "biocurators".

Formerly known as The United Kingdom Office for Library and Information Networking, UKOLN was a centre of expertise in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information, education and cultural heritage communities. UKOLN was based at the University of Bath and was funded through a mixture of core and project grants. Latterly it received its core funding solely from JISC, but had received core grants previously from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and the British Library.

In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies, and it combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and "born-digital" content, regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time. The Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Preservation and Reformatting Section of the American Library Association, defined digital preservation as combination of "policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content over time." According to the Harrod's Librarian Glossary, digital preservation is the method of keeping digital material alive so that they remain usable as technological advances render original hardware and software specification obsolete.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cultural heritage</span> Physical artifact or intangible attribute of a society inherited from past generations

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fedora Commons</span>

Fedora is a digital asset management (DAM) content repository architecture upon which institutional repositories, digital archives, and digital library systems might be built. Fedora is the underlying architecture for a digital repository, and is not a complete management, indexing, discovery, and delivery application. It is a modular architecture built on the principle that interoperability and extensibility are best achieved by the integration of data, interfaces, and mechanisms as clearly defined modules.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital humanities</span> Area of scholarly activity

Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.

Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web to ensure the information is preserved in an archive for future researchers, historians, and the public. Web archivists typically employ web crawlers for automated capture due to the massive size and amount of information on the Web. The largest web archiving organization based on a bulk crawling approach is the Wayback Machine, which strives to maintain an archive of the entire Web.

The Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) was a research and teaching institute at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. It was established in 1997 with Professor Seamus Ross as Founding Director until 2009. HATII led research in archival and library science and in information/knowledge management. Research strengths were in the areas of humanities computing, digitisation, digital curation and preservation, and archives and records management.

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) was established to help solve the extensive challenges of digital preservation and digital curation and to lead research, development, advice, and support services for higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.

<i>Internet Archaeology</i> Academic journal

Internet Archaeology is an academic journal and one of the first fully peer-reviewed electronic journals covering archaeology. It was established in 1996. The journal was part of the eLIb project's electronic journals. The journal is produced and hosted at the Department of Archaeology at the University of York and published by the Council for British Archaeology. The journal has won several awards for its creative exemplars of linked e-publications and archives.

The digital repository audit method based on risk assessment (DRAMBORA) is a methodology and associated software-based toolkit developed by Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) to support the assessment of digital preservation repositories. Documentation for the DRAMBORA toolkit is available at the Digital Curation Centre's and DigitalPreservationEurope's DRAMBORA Interactive page.

Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection, and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains, and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. Enterprises are starting to use digital curation to improve the quality of information and data within their operational and strategic processes. Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the information accessible to users indefinitely. Digital curation includes digital asset management, data curation, digital preservation, and electronic records management.

A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital media formats or a library accessible through the internet. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection. Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals or organizations. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. These information retrieval systems are able to exchange information with each other through interoperability and sustainability.

Data curation is the organization and integration of data collected from various sources. It involves annotation, publication and presentation of the data such that the value of the data is maintained over time, and the data remains available for reuse and preservation. Data curation includes "all the processes needed for principled and controlled data creation, maintenance, and management, together with the capacity to add value to data". In science, data curation may indicate the process of extraction of important information from scientific texts, such as research articles by experts, to be converted into an electronic format, such as an entry of a biological database.

In statistics and natural language processing, a topic model is a type of statistical model for discovering the abstract "topics" that occur in a collection of documents. Topic modeling is a frequently used text-mining tool for discovery of hidden semantic structures in a text body. Intuitively, given that a document is about a particular topic, one would expect particular words to appear in the document more or less frequently: "dog" and "bone" will appear more often in documents about dogs, "cat" and "meow" will appear in documents about cats, and "the" and "is" will appear approximately equally in both. A document typically concerns multiple topics in different proportions; thus, in a document that is 10% about cats and 90% about dogs, there would probably be about 9 times more dog words than cat words. The "topics" produced by topic modeling techniques are clusters of similar words. A topic model captures this intuition in a mathematical framework, which allows examining a set of documents and discovering, based on the statistics of the words in each, what the topics might be and what each document's balance of topics is.

Islandora is a free and open-source software digital repository system based on Fedora Commons, Drupal and a host of additional applications. It is open source software and was originally developed at the University of Prince Edward Island by the Robertson Library.

Digital heritage is the use of digital media in the service of understanding and preserving cultural or natural heritage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lorna M. Hughes</span>

Lorna M. Hughes has been Professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow since 2015. From 2016 to 2019, she oversaw the redevelopment of the Information Studies subject area The re-launch was marked by an international symposium at the University of Glasgow in 2017.

Michèle V. Cloonan is an American library and information science educator. She is a professor in the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, in Boston, Massachusetts, and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons. She is an advocate for the preservation of cultural heritage.

The International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems is a "major international research initiative in which archival scholars, computer engineering scholars, national archival institutions and private industry representatives are collaborating to develop the theoretical and methodological knowledge required for the permanent preservation of authentic records created in electronic systems." As a global consortia that works to develop preservation strategies, the project focuses on "developing the knowledge essential to the long-term preservation of authentic records created and/or maintained in digital form and providing the basis for standards, policies, strategies and plans of action capable of ensuring the longevity of such material and the ability of its users to trust its authenticity."

References

  1. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 March 2016. Retrieved 8 March 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  2. HATII Archived 2006-08-15 at the Wayback Machine , University of Glasgow, UK.
  3. Digital Curation Centre, UK.
  4. ERPANET.
  5. DELOS Digital Libraries Network of Excellence Archived 2011-03-05 at the Wayback Machine
  6. Planets Project.
  7. Digicult.
  8. S. Ross and A. Gow, 1999, Digital archaeology? Rescuing Neglected or Damaged Data Resources, (London & Bristol: British Library and Joint Information Systems Committee), ISBN   1-900508-51-6.
  9. S. Ross, 2007, Digital Preservation, Archival Science and Methodological Foundations for Digital Libraries Archived 2010-01-08 at the Wayback Machine , Keynote Address at the 11th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL), Budapest (17 September 2007).
  10. S, Ross, 2000, Changing Trains at Wigan: Digital Preservation and the Future of Scholarship, National Preservation Office (British Library), Occasional Publication, ISBN   0-7123-4717-8.
  11. Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster: An Animation, YouTube.
  12. "2016 Elected Fellows". Royal Society of Edinburgh . Archived from the original on 9 March 2016.

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Academic offices
Preceded by
Jens-Erik Mai (Acting)
Dean of University of Toronto Faculty of Information
2009 – 2015
Succeeded by
Wendy Duff