User:Illuminatusds

About Me
In May 2016 I joined Durham University as a information systems specialist in the Computing and Information Services Web Team, having previously been employed as an Academic Support Specialist in the School of Arts and New Media at the Scarborough Campus of the University of Hull since 1999.

My current role involves web development across a range of languages and platforms.

While in Scarborough, I taught a number of subjects at undergraduate and postgraduate level, as well as supervising postgraduate students and being involved in research activity. I taught a number of modules, including Interaction Design (an introduction to HCI principles), Information Systems, Web Systems Management (basic networking and introductory server-side programming), Media Culture & Society and cyberpsychology (on the module Psychology of Internet Behaviour). I have used Wikimedia tools and systems during teaching and research. My general academic interests are in web engineering, systems design and development, with my current research focused in the realms of "digital archaeology" (the capture, analysis and preservation) and curation of digital artefacts).

I am also a Chartered Member of the British Computer Society (MBCS CITP), a Professional Member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Interests
My "outside" interests are fairly wide-ranging, from the academic to the positively silly. I have been editing Wikipedia, in my own small way (and of late not as much as I might like), since April 2006. I think of myself as an occasional wikignome, so I enjoy wandering around when I get the time, making little changes here and there, incrementally trying to make Wikipedia a slightly better place, one edit at a time: a kind of wiki Kaizen (or even ウィキ改善), if you like. I am a | Wikimedia UK member. In July 2012 I attended the Wikimania 2012 conference in Washington DC, USA and also attended Wikimania 2014 in August 2014 in London, as well as EduWiki events in Cardiff and Edinburgh.

I also previously administered a Mediawiki install for the | Malta Media Memory Project (M3P).

Research
My research interests began in the realm of software and web engineering, and determining objective quality metrics for the construction of web-based systems and applications. I took part in the Fourth International Workshop on Website Evolution, held in Montréal, in Canada in October 2002. I have a long-standing interest in mark-up languages, web technologies and server-side programming.

Later I worked on a collaborative project to develop a cultural repository for the M3P. This work led to me embarking on PhD study (not completed) to create a framework for linking social media to longer term repository archival and management, and better understanding some of the cultural mechanisms that might help this to happen. The initial stage used MediaWiki, with the intention for next stages of the research to involve examining the interface between MediaWiki and social media networking tools, such as Facebook and Twitter.