Seamus Ross

Biography

Seamus Ross was born 12 November 1957, 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 (USA), his M.A. (1982) from the University of Pennsylvania (USA), and his D.Phil. (1992) from the University of Oxford (UK).

Seamus Ross is Dean and Professor, the iSchool at the University of Toronto, also known as the Faculty of Information. Before joining Toronto, he was Professor of Humanities Informatics and Digital Curation and Founding Director of HATII (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute) (1997–2009) at the University of Glasgow. He served as Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre (2004–9) in the UK, and was Principal Director of ERPANET and Digital Preservation Europe (DPE) and a co-principal investigator such projects as the DELOS Digital Libraries Network of Excellence, Planets and the Digicult Forum. 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, digitisation, digital repositories, emulation, digital archaeology, semantic extraction and genre classification, and cultural heritage informatics. See for instance his study of digital archaeology, his examination of digital preservation and archival science, and his introduction to digital preservation, Changing Trains at Wigan. 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,