Susan Hockey facts for kids

Susan Hockey (born in 1946) is an English computer scientist. She is a very important person in the field of digital humanities. This is where computers are used to study things like history, literature, and languages.

Susan Hockey used to be a professor at University College London. She taught about libraries and how to manage information. She has written many things about how computers help us understand old texts and how libraries can keep digital information safe.

Early Life

Susan Hockey was born in 1946 in a town called Halifax, West Yorkshire. Her birth name was Susan Petty. She went to school at Princess Mary High School in Halifax. Later, she studied at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, which is a college at Oxford University.

Her Work with Computers

Starting in Computing

In 1969, Susan Hockey started working at the Atlas Computer Laboratory in Chilton. This was a place where people used big computers for research.

She became one of the first members of a group called the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) in 1973. This group helps people use computers to study literature and language.

Developing Computer Tools

In 1975, Susan Hockey joined Oxford University Computing Services. While at Atlas, she created computer programs to show characters from languages that don't use the usual alphabet.

At Oxford, she helped create a special computer program called the Oxford Concordance Program. This program was based on an older one called COCOA. These programs were very important for people studying humanities using computers. They helped researchers find and analyze words in large texts.

Leading Digital Humanities

From 1991 to 1997, Susan Hockey was in charge of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities. This center was part of both Rutgers University and Princeton University in New Jersey, USA.

After that, from 1997 to 1999, she was a professor and director at the Canadian Institute for Research Computing in Arts at the University of Alberta in Canada.

In 2000, she joined University College London as a professor. From 2001, she was the director of the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at UCL. She retired from this role in 2004.

Awards and Recognition

In 2004, Susan Hockey received a special award called the Roberto Busa Prize. This award is given by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. It recognized her amazing work and achievements in using computers for humanities research throughout her life.

She has also talked about her career journey in digital humanities. She shared her experiences from the 1960s and 1970s in an interview with Julianne Nyhan.

Important Groups She Helped Start

Susan Hockey helped start several important groups related to digital humanities. These include:

• The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) in 1973. She was also its chair from 1984 to 1997.
• The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) in 1978.
• She was also part of the steering committee for the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) from 1987 to 1999. This group creates rules for how to mark up electronic texts so computers can understand them.

See also

In Spanish: Susan Hockey para niños