Dr. Jason Ensor, Research & Technical Development Manager, Digital Humanities
Western Sydney University
I am Research & Technical Development Manager, Digital Humanities, for the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, where I provide vital research management and technical expertise as well as enabling, developing and coordinating Digital Humanities projects.
I have been engaged in digital humanities (humanities computing) research for over a decade. I am proficient in the key technologies and approaches commonly used in digital humanities and digital history projects –such as creating, modelling and manipulating structured data; developing tools to search, query, retrieve and display structured data using relational databases and standards-compliant web-delivery services; Geo-Location; XML and related technologies; designing and writing programs and interfaces which facilitate content creation and web publication. I am fluent in HTML5, JQuery, PHP and MySQL and comfortable configuring and managing LAMP servers. In my research I am particularly interested in systems and strategies for measuring and benchmarking research impact across disciplines; the evaluation gap between “born digital” scholarship and traditional research outputs; digital cultural mapping, geo-temporal analysis and big data in humanities scholarship; the interaction between consumerism, technology and cultural transformation; the future of books projected from an historical perspective and from current product developments; the predictive role of creative work in book formats; and open business models in academic publishing.
I studied at Murdoch University, Perth Australia, and have held positions at The University of Queensland, Curtin University of Technology, The Australian National University, Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia. Most recently, I was a Data Analyst in Research & Development at Murdoch University (Perth) and Technical Officer for the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at The Australian National University (Canberra). In Perth I administered Murdoch University’s ERA (Excellence in Research Australia) complete ERA2 data submission. In Canberra I led the design and development of one of the largest digital history and knowledge management projects in the field of Australian Indigenous History.
I am Director of Electronic Resources for the international Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). I am a Founding Editorial Board member for The Anthem Book History and Print Culture Series (UK) and I am a Chief Investigator (CI-3) with Simon Burrows (CI-1) on the ‘Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment’ Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project (AUD $460K, 2016-2017). I regularly contribute to The Conversation on matters related to research impact and rethinking scholarship in the digital age. I was Conference Director for DH2015.