Somewhere around 1995, about the time that Harold Short and I were busy designing the ill-fated UK Arts and Humanities Data Service, I made the transition into management. It’s a bit of a blur now, but I think someone must have noticed I was having too much fun. For whatever reason, in one of those fits of enthusiasm for reorganisation which periodically grips OUCS, it was decided to knock together various hitherto discrete activities and create a new thingie called the “Humanities Computing Unit” with me as its manager. This rapidly proved to be not so much herding cats, as trying to prevent the huskies from disagreeing too much about the destination of our sledge: you will appreciate the justice of this metaphor if I remind you that the huskies in question included a comparatively youthful pair of doctors called Lee and Fraser, and Mr Michael Popham, amongst others.
Running the HCU was my introduction to the wonderful world of Oxford committees, the complexities of which rapidly made database knitting, international encoding research projects, and even corpus design look like child’s play. I also found myself having to develop something I’d never heard of called “interpersonal skills” (some will assure you I was as bad at this as at bit twiddling). Still, it was actually quite a lot of fun running a unit dedicated to something that I had vigorously argued in public didn’t exist, on a largely fictious budget, along with a bunch of other enthusiastic lunatics. The HCU had a strong sense of its own identity, largely because it was sequestered away from the rest of OUCS in the afore-mentioned soggy basement, but also because its members were all so, how can I put this tactfully, weird. It also, I can proudly say, introduced many fine traditions to OUCS, not least the Xmas party. And I am particularly proud of the fact that its lunatics have now taken over the asylum.
Talking of lunatics, on Sept 11, 2001, as everyone knows, the world changed forever. Quite apart from some bizarre incident in New York, that was when we realised that the HCU had become too noticeable to continue as a discrete entity within OUCS, and that unfortunately the newly invented Humanities division didn’t have the money or the will power to offer it any other home. (It probably now has the latter, but sadly still not the former). We made a few attempts to redefine ourselves without the dread “humanities” badge we had been so proud of only five years earlier, but no-one was fooled. It was time to redeploy the components of the HCU across the rest of OUCS and I had to grow up and start doing serious things like amalgamate the OUCS front line support services, help square the circle that is co-ordination of distributed IT services across the university, manage a Research Technologies Service, set up and run an internal forum called the User Services Team, and manage the Core User Directory pilot service. Did I mention staying awake at SMG meetings? Yes, I had to do that too.
Fortunately I was still able to take some time off for good behaviour. Amongst other things, the TEI was reborn as an open source community, largely under the prodding of the very same Sebastian Rahtz I had known in the late eighties, and also underwent some long overdue technical enhancements which I could expatiate on at length, but won’t. The success of the TEI also inspired a number of other projects in which I was involved, notably a European effort to standardize manuscript descriptions originally masterminded by Peter Robinson, which led to my (and others) spending much of the start of the 21st century trying to explain the delights of XML to bewildered librarians across many parts of eastern Europe. And a bit nearer home, when some time around 2008 les digital humanités suddenly became cool again, I found myself invited to participate in some French events and projects, most notably an infrastructural project called ADONIS to which I was seconded for a year in 2009.
I should probably close this entry with some kind of magisterial summary, but the muse is fickle and the retirement party is close — and later today I expect to have to summarize at least some of this for the amusement of those gathered at the nice party OUCS is laying on for me here in Oxford. So all I will say now is that despite the occasional grumbling from my perspective it’s hard to conceive of a better employer than the University of Oxford has been. Throughout my career, I’ve worked closely with all sorts of people who don’t work for OUCS, and time and again I’ve found myself being quietly smug, and even mildly surprised by the way other institutions don’t seem to function in quite the same way. It’s not just the free coffee, or the readiness to fund the occasional cricket match or Artsweek event; it’s not even just the professionalism and the mutual respect that permeates all of those responsible for our technically very sophisticated environment: it’s the presence of a culture that allows, encourages, even requires people to find their own way and to develop their own enthusiasms. I used to joke that I’d always benefitted from years of benign neglect, but I have also learned from the other side of the fence just how hard it is to find the right balance between helping people to build their own way, and making sure that they build something worth while. So my thanks for that are due to the many previous OUCS directors and managers I’ve reported to — from Alan, via Christopher, Alan (a different one), Linda, Alan (yet another), Alan (the same one again), Alec (just for a change), Paul, and Stuart.
What next? That would be telling. If they let me keep this blog going….