Lou Burnard


Lou Burnard is an internationally recognised expert in digital humanities, particularly in the area of text encoding and digital libraries. He was assistant director of Oxford University Computing Services from 2001 to September 2010 where he officially retired from OUCS. Prior to that, he was manager of the Humanities Computing Unit at OUCS for five years. He has worked in ICT support for research in the humanities since the 1990s. He was one of the founding editors of the Text Encoding Initiative and continues to play an active part in its maintenance and development, as a consultant to the TEI Technical Council and as an elected TEI board member. He has played a key role in the establishment of many other key activities and initiatives in this area, such as the UK Arts and Humanities Data Service, and the British National Corpus and has published and lectured widely. Since 2008 he has also worked as a Member of the Conseil Scientifique for the CNRS-funded "Adonis" TGE.

Education & Career

He gained a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford University, graduated with a first in English in 1968, a MPhil in 19th century English Studies, MA. He went on to teach English at the University of Malawi between 1972 and 1974.
His first job for the University Computing Service was as a data centre operator. He described it as sitting in a large room in the Department of Atmospheric Physics, with a line printer, a card reader, a card punch and three teletype devices. The one he sat in front of told the time every five minutes and the date every half hour. If it stopped doing either, he had instructions to call an engineer. Aside from light duties tearing up output from the line printer, that was essentially all he had to do for his 8-hour shift. He learned to program in Algol68, created a concordance to the songs of Bob Dylan, and finally got a job as a programmer in 1974.
He claimed the first real program he wrote was 12 lines of assembler to link a PDP-8 driven graphics display to an ICL 1900 mainframe. He learned Snobol4, and worked with Susan Hockey on the design of the Oxford Concordance Program. He also worked on network database management systems, notably Cullinane's IDMS, and on ICL's CAFS text search engine.
In 1976 he set up the Oxford Text Archive together with Susan Hockey.
After flirting briefly with applications of computers in History under the tutelage of Manfred Thaller, he succumbed to the lure of SGML in 1988 following the Poughkeepsie Conference which launched the Text Encoding Initiative project of which he has been European editor since February 1989.
The Oxford electronic Shakespeare published by the Oxford University Press was the first to offer a commercial e-text encoded for analysis. William Montgomery, one of the associate editors, and Lou Burnard encoded each poem or play with COCOA tags so that it could be processed by Micro-Oxford Concordance Program.
Since October 1990 he has also been responsible for OUCS participation in the British National Corpus Project a 100 million word corpus of modern British English.
He initiated the Xaira project, an advanced text searching software system for XML resources, originally developed for searching the British National Corpus, it was funded by the Mellon Foundation between 2005–6.

Publications

Books